Sisvel Hires McCurdy to Lead Proposed Patent Licensing Lab: 2026 SEP Rate Impact

This guide maps how Sisvel's September 2026 hiring of Dan McCurdy to lead the proposed Patent Licensing Innovation Laboratory reshapes SEP royalty negotiation dynamics.

It explains why 2026 rates will split from 2027 outcomes and why bilateral agreements with fixed per-unit caps and 2027 re-opener clauses are the defensible move for Q4 2026 licensees.

How the Licensing Innovation Lab Actually Works

The Lab did not begin as a Sisvel project. Dan McCurdy stepped down as CEO of RPX at the end of June 2026, and by his own account he did not know what the next chapter would be — only that he wanted to work with people he trusted on improving the patent ecosystem. The origin story he tells is a conversation with Sisvel's Mattia, built on a shared conviction that licensing friction is neither inevitable nor beyond the industry's ability to reduce. That conversation became the Patent Licensing Innovation Laboratory, which McCurdy joined Sisvel to lead. He laid out the origins and aims publicly in remarks delivered at Sisvel Connect on 16 September 2026, published on sisvel.com. For a licensee, the operative fact is the sequencing: the Lab was announced as a proposal, not as a launched program with terms.

McCurdy's framing of the problem is the part worth reading closely, because it tells you what the Lab is designed to do. He identifies five recurring sources of cost: search costs, information gaps, valuation disagreements, repetitive negotiations, and litigation used far too often as a path to a transaction. His stated premise is that these inefficiencies cost the industry, shareholders, and consumers tens of billions of dollars each year, and that much of that expense creates no invention, no product, and no value for either side. Note what that list has in common — every item is a transaction-cost problem, not an infringement problem. A Lab built to attack those five items is a Lab built to change how rates get set, not whether they get paid.

The structural logic McCurdy describes is the piece a Q4 2026 negotiator needs to internalize. He notes that he spent most of his career working with or for operating-company licensees, often bringing them together to resolve disputes more efficiently, while Sisvel spent decades bringing patent owners together to license more efficiently. His conclusion is that the two models address opposite sides of the same market but rest on the same insight: collective action reduces needless cost and complexity. Licensees, in his words, can often resolve disputes more efficiently together. That is a licensee-side aggregation thesis, stated by the person now leading the Lab.

What that means for your negotiation is a timing check, not a rate check. The Lab's premise implies that a collective licensee-side vehicle could eventually produce a reference rate or a coordinated negotiating posture — but as of McCurdy's 16 September 2026 remarks, no rate card, publication date, or membership terms have been established. The defensible read is that 2026 bilateral deals and any 2027 Lab output will be priced against different information sets. Before you sign anything in Q4 2026, run three checks:

The timing logic follows directly from the reader rule stated at the top of this guide: with no Lab rate card, publication date, or membership terms on the record as of McCurdy's 16 September 2026 remarks, the bilateral-with-re-opener structure is the only 2026 action the current record supports. The three checks in the table above are the operational test of that rule.

The Evidence: What Is Actually Documented

Start with what is actually on the record. IAM Media reported that Sisvel hired Dan McCurdy to run a proposed Patent Licensing Innovation Laboratory — and the headline's own wording matters. "Proposed" is the operative word: as of that report, the Lab was an initiative with a leader, not an operating institution with published terms. If you are a licensee, treat every characterization of the Lab that goes beyond "proposed, with McCurdy leading it" as unverified until Sisvel itself publishes something checkable.

The same outlet, in the same news cycle, reported a second data point: Texas Instruments handed VideoLabs a licensing mandate covering HEVC and VVC patents, dated 09 September 2026. Read that alongside the McCurdy announcement and the picture is precise: in the very week the licensee-side collective experiment was unveiled, a major licensor was still transferring a SEP portfolio into a bilateral-style enforcement and licensing vehicle. Both facts are true at once, and both should shape your Q4 posture.

IAM Media's litigation coverage from the same period adds the third leg: key patent non-practicing entities were ramping up patent litigation, led by Valtrus's data-centre suits. That is a reminder that the alternative to a negotiated rate is not a pause — it is docket exposure. Before you set your negotiation calendar, run a simple check: map which NPEs hold declared-essential patents in your product lines and whether Valtrus-style data-centre targeting touches your server or infrastructure footprint. If it does, your timeline for reaching agreement shortens accordingly.

What does this documented trio support, and what does it not? It supports the claim that collective, licensee-side rate negotiation is now a live institutional project with a named, experienced leader, and that licensors are simultaneously continuing business-as-usual bilateral mandates. It does not, on the public record cited here, tell you what rate the Lab would seek or when its terms become binding — those are separate questions, and the discipline of separating them is what keeps your negotiation strategy grounded.

The practical rule that follows: treat the McCurdy announcement as a timing signal, not a rate signal. The documented facts — a proposed Lab, a dated bilateral mandate, escalating NPE litigation — all point in one direction for a Q4 2026 licensee: the window in which a counterparty still has an incentive to close a direct, capped bilateral deal with you is the window before any collective mechanism publishes its first benchmark. Verify each of these three items yourself against the primary sources — the IAM Media reports and Sisvel's own published remarks — before your next negotiation session, and date-stamp your file memo so your team negotiates against the record, not against rumor.

Options Compared: Bilateral vs Pool vs Lab

Three structures are actually available to a SEP licensee in Q4 2026, and they are not interchangeable. Bilateral negotiation is the only one in which you control the cap, the field-of-use, and the re-opener. Pool licensing through Sisvel-style aggregation lowers per-party transaction cost, but you inherit the pool's rate card and cannot re-open on 2027 Lab output unless the pool agreement expressly says so. Waiting for the Lab's framework costs you nothing in information today, but it buys you no rate certainty for 2027 either. On that three-way comparison, bilateral wins 2026 — not because it is elegant, but because it is the only structure that lets you set a fixed per-unit cap now and preserve a 2027 re-opener.

Start with what bilateral actually gives you. You negotiate the per-unit cap directly, you define the field-of-use, and you write the re-opener clause yourself. That control is the whole point. The cost is real: you bear full search and valuation expense, and McCurdy's own remarks at Sisvel Connect identify search costs, information gaps, and valuation disagreements as the core inefficiencies that make licensing friction so expensive. In a bilateral deal you are paying that freight alone. The check before you sign: confirm the cap is per-unit and fixed, confirm the field-of-use is written narrowly enough to survive a product-line change, and confirm the re-opener triggers on publication of the Lab's framework rather than on a date you cannot verify.

Pool licensing inverts the trade. Per-party transaction cost falls because one rate card covers many owners, and Sisvel has spent decades aggregating patent owners for exactly that reason. But the rate card is the pool's, not yours, and the re-opener is only as good as the pool agreement's text. Before you sign into any pool, read the amendment and re-opener provisions line by line and ask one question: if the Lab publishes a framework in 2027, does this agreement reopen automatically, or only by mutual consent? If the answer is mutual consent, you have no re-opener.

Waiting for the Lab is the third option, and it is the weakest for a Q4 2026 negotiator. You spend nothing on information today, but you also hold no cap, no field-of-use, and no re-opener — and the Lab's rate card, publication date, and membership terms are not established on the record. Zero information cost is not the same as zero risk.

The rule follows from the table: as priced above, bilateral is the only structure that combines a cap you set with a re-opener you wrote, at the cost of bearing search and valuation expense alone and giving up the pool's lower transaction cost and the waiter's free information.

Costs and Numbers That Matter

Two numbers from the public record deserve careful handling, and both are easy to misuse. The first is McCurdy's figure from his Sisvel remarks: licensing inefficiencies — search costs, information gaps, valuation disagreements, repetitive negotiations, and litigation used as a path to a transaction — cost the industry "tens of billions of dollars each year." Treat that as a rhetorical aggregate describing the whole ecosystem, not a per-licensee number. Do not divide it by portfolio size, by product volume, or by any denominator you happen to have; the figure was not built that way, and any per-unit derivation you compute from it will be fiction dressed as arithmetic.

The second number is more usable. The VideoLabs mandate covers 188 patents across HEVC and VVC, per IAM Media's 9 September 2026 report. If you are benchmarking a per-patent rate ask in the video codec space, 188 is your denominator. A proposed royalty divided by 188 gives you a per-patent figure you can compare against other codec portfolios — but only within that space. The mandate covers HEVC and VVC specifically, so extending the 188-patent denominator to cellular, Wi-Fi, or automotive SEP negotiations is a category error, not a benchmark.

Now the discipline part: there is no published Lab fee schedule, no membership fee, and no rate card in anything Sisvel or McCurdy has put on the record. That absence is itself a negotiating fact. Until a rate card exists, any Lab-derived rate is a forecast, not a price — and forecasts favor whoever waits less. The check to run before you rely on any Lab number: ask for the document. If the counterparty cites a Lab rate, membership cost, or publication timeline, request the source. If they cannot produce one, you are negotiating against a rumor, and rumors should carry no weight in a per-unit cap.

Practical rule for Q4 2026: anchor your bilateral negotiation on figures you can verify — the 188-patent count for codec benchmarking, your own product volumes, and comparable bilateral deals — and treat the "tens of billions" aggregate as context for why collective mechanisms are being proposed, never as an input to your rate model. If a licensor argues that the Lab will soon deliver lower friction and therefore you should wait, that argument cuts against them: waiting means accepting a rate set by a mechanism whose pricing nobody has published.

One final check before signing: every figure in your cap and re-opener language should trace to a documented source — the Sisvel remarks, the IAM Media reporting, or your own volumes. In a quarter where no Lab pricing information exists on the record, verifiable arithmetic is your strongest clause.

What the Evidence Does NOT Establish

Before treating the Patent Licensing Innovation Laboratory as a rate-setting force, be clear about what the record does not contain. As of the September 2026 reporting, there is no published Lab rate card, no membership fee schedule, no publication date for any licensing framework, and no named Lab participants beyond McCurdy himself. None of these can be assumed to exist. If a counterparty or adviser cites "Lab rates" in a Q4 2026 negotiation, ask for the document; the correct answer today is that no such document is public.

The same discipline applies to the "tens of billions" figure. In McCurdy's remarks at Sisvel Connect on 16 September 2026, that number describes his characterization of industry-wide friction — search costs, information gaps, valuation disputes, litigation used as a path to transaction. It is not a measured 2026 SEP royalty total, and it should never be cited as one. Using it as a royalty benchmark in a negotiation invites a correction that undermines your credibility on everything else.

The word "proposed" in the IAM Media headline is doing real work. A proposed initiative has published no framework, set no rates, and committed to no methodology. Any 2027 rate prediction attributed to the Lab is therefore speculation until Sisvel publishes something concrete. The verification step is simple and repeatable: check Sisvel's own insights page and IAM Media for a published framework, a rate methodology, or a participant list. Until one of those appears, treat Lab-based forecasts as unanchored.

What this means practically: the absence of a rate card cuts both ways — the Lab cannot yet impose anything on your 2026 negotiation, but you also cannot yet model what it will impose in 2027. That two-sided uncertainty is the same timing case made in the Options Compared section, and it is why the bilateral structure priced there is the defensible position.

One final check for your diligence file: track the gap between McCurdy's stated intent at Sisvel Connect and anything Sisvel actually publishes about the Lab's mechanics. As noted earlier in this guide, intent is not a framework — let the appearance of a published framework on sisvel.com or IAM Media, not a headline, be your trigger for reassessing any rate position.

A Q4 2026 SEP Negotiation

Run the Q4 2026 negotiation as a two-checkpoint exercise against a concrete fact pattern. You ship 1,000,000 units in 2026 and forecast 1,200,000 in 2027. The counterparty holds a 188-patent HEVC and VVC licensing mandate — the Texas Instruments mandate reported by IAM Media on 9 September 2026 — and no Lab framework has been published as of your negotiation date. That last fact is your leverage: anything you agree bilaterally now is priced before any collective benchmark exists to anchor the counterparty higher.

Checkpoint one is the cap. Propose a fixed per-unit figure, not a percentage of net selling price, so that your 2027 volume growth does not silently raise the absolute royalty you owe. Write the clause as: "$X per unit, one-way, 2026 shipments only." The one-way language matters — a two-way cap invites a floor, and a floor converts your volume upside into their guaranteed revenue. With a per-unit cap, the 2026 exposure is arithmetic you control: at an illustrative $0.50 per unit, 1,000,000 units is a $500,000 royalty. Under a percentage structure at the same effective rate, the 2027 forecast of 1,200,000 units would produce $600,000 — a $100,000 increase you never negotiated. The cap eliminates that drift; the re-opener governs what happens next.

Checkpoint two is the re-opener. Insert a clause reading, in substance: "if Sisvel's Patent Licensing Innovation Laboratory publishes a rate framework or benchmark for this portfolio before [re-opener date], the parties will reopen this agreement solely to conform the per-unit rate to that framework." Two limits to insist on. First, the re-opener is one-directional on the benchmark — you conform to the Lab number, whatever it is, rather than renegotiating from scratch. Second, the re-opener date must fall after any plausible Lab publication; given that the Lab was still "proposed" in the 9 September 2026 IAM Media report, a date too early makes the clause dead on arrival, and a date too late leaves you exposed through another shipment cycle.

The worksheet's purpose is to make the trade explicit in the room. You are offering the counterparty certainty — a signed bilateral deal, cash in 2026, no holdout risk — in exchange for a rate fixed before any Lab benchmark can raise it. If they refuse the cap, that refusal is itself information: it says they expect the Lab to price higher than your offer, which tells you how hard to hold your number.

Close by dating the negotiation against the calendar. Every week signed before a Lab framework exists is a week priced on bilateral leverage; every week after is priced on a collective benchmark you did not shape. The 188-patent mandate gives the counterparty scale; the unpublished framework gives you the window. Use it.

Decision Rules for 2026 vs 2027

Rule one: if you ship product in 2026 and the Lab has published no licensing framework, sign a bilateral agreement with a fixed per-unit cap now. Do not wait for the Lab to mature. Attach a re-opener clause with a 60-day window triggered by Lab publication, so any rate the Lab eventually validates can flow into your deal without renegotiating from scratch. The cap protects your 2026 P&L; the re-opener protects your 2027 flexibility.

Rule two: if a counterparty cites the Lab as justification for deferring rate-setting to 2027, ask for the specific URL on sisvel.com/insights where the framework is documented. McCurdy's own remarks were delivered at Sisvel Connect on 16 September 2026 and published there, so a genuine Lab position should be traceable to a page. If no URL exists, treat the proposed 2027 rate as unverified and price it accordingly — an unverifiable future rate is a negotiating position, not a benchmark.

Rule three: if your portfolio sits in the VideoLabs scale — the 188-patent HEVC and VVC mandate that IAM Media reported Texas Instruments handed over on 9 September 2026 — benchmark your per-unit ask against that patent count, not against a percentage-of-revenue figure. Percentage-of-revenue framing invites the counterparty to argue your product mix down the rate; a per-unit figure anchored to a comparable portfolio count keeps the negotiation on verifiable terms.

Rule four: if the Lab publishes a framework before your bilateral deal closes, do not tear up the negotiation. Invoke the re-opener mechanism and test the published framework against the cap you already drafted. A published framework that supports a lower rate strengthens your position; one that supports a higher rate still leaves you holding a signed 2026 cap, which is the entire point of acting early.

Rule five: if the counterparty refuses any fixed per-unit cap and insists on open-ended 2027 terms, read that refusal as information about their expectations. McCurdy's thesis — stated in his Sisvel remarks — is that collective action reduces licensing friction on both sides of the market. A party confident about 2027 rates should have no fear of a cap with a re-opener; a party refusing one is betting on upward drift. Walk away from structure-less deals and revisit after Lab publication, when the information gap closes on its own.

Run all five rules before every Q4 2026 negotiation. The rules are sequential in practice: verify publication status, demand documentation, anchor the benchmark, draft the cap, and only then decide whether to sign or wait.

What to do next

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Sisvel announce the hiring of Dan McCurdy to lead the proposed Patent Licensing Innovation Laboratory?

Sisvel announced the hiring of Dan McCurdy in September 2026 via IAM Media.

What specific licensing mandate did Texas Instruments hand to VideoLabs, and when was it reported?

Texas Instruments handed VideoLabs a 188-patent HEVC and VVC licensing mandate, reported on 09 September 2026.

What type of litigation is Valtrus leading that coincides with the rise in NPE activity?

Valtrus is leading data centre suits as part of the ramping NPE litigation.

What is the recommended contractual structure for Q4 2026 SEP licensees according to the article?

Q4 2026 SEP licensees should sign bilateral agreements with a fixed per-unit cap and a 2027 re-opener clause.

What is the stated purpose of the Patent Licensing Innovation Laboratory as framed by McCurdy?

The Laboratory is framed as an effort to reduce licensing friction.

According to the thesis, how will 2026 SEP royalty rates differ from 2027 outcomes?

2026 SEP royalty rates will split from 2027 outcomes due to McCurdy's hiring signaling a shift toward collective, licensee-side rate negotiation.

Quick answers

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