Owen Waugh

Experience

• Optis v Apple: Part of the team acting for the Optis group in patent dispute with Apple including working on trials which found that Apple were a “willing licensee” and entitled to enforce the ETSI undertaking, and that there was no estoppel defence said to arise out of breach of clause 4.1 open to Apple. Included working as well as part of the team that successfully resisted Apple’s jurisdiction challenge.
• Unwired Planet v Huawei: Part of the team representing Unwired Planet at the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court in the FRAND aspects of the telecommunications dispute.
• Technetix v Teleste: Part of the team defending Teleste in a telecommunications dispute in both IPEC and the High Court.
• Conversant v Huawei & ZTE: Part of the team acting for Conversant in their litigation against Huawei and ZTE, including the, technical trials in the High Court, jurisdictional challenge including at the Supreme Court and related anti-suit injunction.

Recent work

• Acting for Optis in Optis v Apple in a trial which found that Apple were not at that time entitled to enforce the ETSI undertaking against Optis and that Apple would accordingly be injuncted unless Apple committed to enter into a FRAND licence to be determined by the High Court of England and Wales.
• Acting for Optis in Optis v Apple in a trial which found that Apple infringed one of Optis’ Standard Essential Patents including finding by the court that Apple’s alleged estoppel defence arising from original patent owner’s declaration to ETSI failed. This involved findings that the original declarant did not breach the ETSI IPR Policy, as a matter of French law in making their declaration and that in any event the relevant standard setting organisation working group did not consider the original declarant’s proposal to be IPR-free and so no proprietary estoppel could arise. (link)
• Acting for Unwired Planet and Conversant Wireless in successful Supreme Court proceedings against Huawei (and ZTE for Conversant) on the issue of FRAND in the context of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) in the field of telecommunication. (link)
• Acting for Teleste in successfully defending a claim for patent infringement by Technetix BV in the United Kingdom Patents Court in the field of cable TV equipment. (link)
• Acted for Unwired Planet in successful Court of Appeal proceedings against Huawei for standard essential patent and FRAND litigation. (link)

Published articles

• December 2021
  Patent Lawyer Magazine, High court holds on to jurisdiction in SEP case (link)
• February 2021
  Lexology, Court of Appeal adopts narrow interpretation of Crown use defence in IPCom v Vodafone (link)