BREAKING: InterDigital and Amazon will determine video patent licensing terms through arbitration

Context: The video patent licensing dispute between Amazon and InterDigital led to interjurisdictional friction, culminating in a recent hearing in the UPC’s Court of Appeal (CoA) (May 28, 2026 ip fray article). At that hearing, InterDigital made it publicly known that it offered Amazon binding arbitration. Amazon’s counsel responded (as we also reported) that they wanted a public court decision on certain licensing questions.

What’s new: InterDigital just announced that the terms of the license agreement will be resolved through binding arbitration (June 11, 2026 InterDigital press release). All litigation will be withdrawn in favor of alternative dispute resolution.

Direct impact:

• This is not a complete settlement as the parties are still not in agreement on the financial terms of this video patent license agreement. They have agreed on the dispute resolution mechanism, and have agreed to continue to disagree on the terms
• But it means that the dispute is now being resolved in private and there is, realistically, no more risk of antisuit injunctions and similar instruments causing friction between courts in different jurisdictions.
• Without knowledge of the exact terms of the arbitration agreement, it is impossible to tell which party will likely obtain a more favorable outcome:
  • InterDigital had some leverage given a recent UK appellate ruling according to which a standard arbitration offer must be accepted or otherwise a UK case may be stayed permanently (May 12, 2026 ip fray article). If what InterDigital offered and Amazon accepted are standard terms with no particular parameters, the ultimate royalty amount could be far higher than anything Amazon was prepared to offer before, given structural reasons for which arbitration tends to gravitate toward the middle. The parties were light-years apart. Those are usually the situations in which implementers do not want to arbitrate unless certain parameters make it likely that the result will be substantially below the middle of the parties’ positions.
  • Amazon gained leverage from the position taken by the UPC’s CoA at the recent hearing (as discussed further below).

Wider ramifications:

• For the relationship between the UK judiciary and courts in other jurisdictions, this development is suboptimal. It looks to courts outside the UK as if parties are now required to offer arbitration instead of being able to enforce their patents in such as jurisdictions as the UPC, Munich I Regional Court, Rio de Janeiro State Court, and in U.S. court. This dispute would have had the potential for a number of further filings in multiple jurisdictions.
• The UPC’s CoA, however, declared itself disinclined at the recent hearing to interpret the existing anti-interference injunction the way the Mannheim Local Division (LD) itself said it should be interpreted. That may have weakened InterDigital. If the UPC CoA had endorsed the Mannheim stance, Amazon would have had to ensure that its UK action seeking a court-imposed contract would not have interfered with patent enforcement in the UPC. The Mannheim LD would have been prepared to order sua sponte sanctions in the alternative.
• Litigants in similar situations will now have to consider taking early and preferably pre-emptive action in the UPC against UK rate-setting actions. What the CoA stated at the hearing did not suggest that interference of any kind, with or without a UK trial, would be tolerated. The anti-interference injunction case will, however, be withdrawn before a CoA decision is likely to come down.