Essential patent

Essential patents are like the special toys that you need to play a game with your friends. They are really important because without them, you cannot have fun playing the game. Just like how important these toys are, essential patents are really important in technology because they are the inventions that are necessary to make a product work.

Let's say you have a really cool phone that you love to use, but you need certain inventions to make it work properly. For example, you need a special kind of chip to connect to the internet, and you need a special kind of screen to see everything on your phone. If these inventions are essential patents, it means that the people who came up with these ideas have the right to decide who else can use them. They might give their ideas to other companies so they can use them too, but they might not want everyone to have access to them.

So, if another company wants to use these essential patents to make a similar product, they will need to ask the people who made these inventions for permission. The people who made the inventions can decide to charge a fee for using their idea or they might not allow their idea to be used by anyone else. This is why essential patents are important and why they have special rules around them.