Tesla tells UKSC it shouldn’t have to do what much smaller companies like Doro, Emporia, Nothing can do — and relies on SME astroturfers

Context: Last year, the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) surprisingly granted Tesla’s permission to appeal the dismissal of its FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing) action against Avanci and one of its licensors, InterDigital (July 2, 2025 ip fray article). It was an achievement for Tesla’s lawyers, but has no potential to help the company get a better license deal at the end of the day (January 7, 2026 ip fray article). Courts in other jurisdictions won’t be dissuaded, much less prevented, from granting patent injunctions,and a multiplicity of bilateral licenses would cost Tesla more, not less, in the aggregate.

What’s new: The UKSC hearing, scheduled for 2.5 days, started today. Almost all of the speaking time available today was used by Tesla. Tesla’s case would not have been thrown out by the two lower courts if there weren’t serious issues.

Direct impact:

• The most critical deficiency remains that Tesla claims it is not enough for a company like InterDigital to offer a bilateral license on FRAND terms: even a pool license must be subject to a FRAND review, and in Tesla’s opinion, the only FRAND license is a pool license as it would allegedly be too cumbersome to secure 80+ bilateral licenses. But it should not be hard for the court to see through that smokescreen:
  • There are various companies out there who make fewer mobile phones per year (such as Doro, Emporia, Fairphone, and Nothing) than Tesla makes cars, and are far smaller than Tesla (one of the world’s most valuable companies), yet have to work out bilateral license deals with the very same group of patent holders. Only about a handful of them license their cellular standard-essential patents (SEPs) to phone makers through a pool.
  • The bankruptcy of Tesla’s “only a pool license works” argument is evidenced by Tesla’s barrister (who also said today that the UKSC’s Unwired decision was right even though he actually represented the other side in that case) pointing the court to a submission by ACT | The App Association, an organization that wanted to become a member of the Electronic Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), but decided to withdraw its application due to massive resistance (December 2, 2025 ip fray article).
• The hurdle for jurisdiction is low in the UK, and a far greater challenge awaits those who surmount it. Even if the UKSC decided to turn a blind eye to the gaping holes in Tesla’s case and revived it, either by letting Tesla sue Avanci or by allowing Tesla to raise pool licensing issues in a dispute with only InterDigital, the result would still not necessarily be that Tesla would be deemed entitled to a pool license on court-determined terms. A number of fundamental questions of fact, and mixed questions of fact and law, would remain to be resolved. The “serious issue to be tried” and “useful purpose” requirements at this stage of proceeding represent a much lower hurdle than proving at a full merits trial that Tesla can’t do what Doro or Fairphone can do.
• No matter what a UK court might say, Avanci would not be in a position to grant Tesla a license on terms not authorized by the actual patent holders.

Wider ramifications: If the UKSC agreed with Tesla, it would solve no problem, but create one and exacerbate another:

• The patent pool ecosystem, which has brought licensors and licensees together in what would have taken hundreds of thousands of bilateral license agreements (April 21, 2026 ip fray article), would have to deal with additional litigation instead of focusing on delivering results.
• Interjurisdictional friction between the UK and other jurisdictions would exacerbate. Jurisdictions representing pproximately 60% of the global economy have expressed their misgivings of territorial overreach in this context (April 14, 2026 ip fray article) and, to some extent, indicated that there would be serious pushback.