Context: This is a follow-up to yesterday’s InterDigital-Amazon news of an agreement to resolve their video patent licensing dispute through arbitration instead of litigation (June 11, 2026 ip fray article).
What’s new: We have obtained a UK court order (to extend various deadlines in Amazon v. InterDigital after the parties agreed on arbitration) that sheds some light on the course of events:
- The parameters of the arbitration are still unknown.
- What the order reveals is when and how the agreement was reached. That allows certain inferences regarding leverage.
Direct impact:
- It is worth nothing that there never was a question as to whether the parties would enter into a license agreement. Amazon’s UK action was premised on Amazon declaring itself willing to take a license on UK court-determined terms. InterDigital’s enforcement actions in various other jurisdictions pointed to pre-litigation licensing offers. At least one Wall Street firm called yesterday’s announcement a “huge validation for streaming”. Even if if it was “huge validation”, it would already have happened last summer when Amazon made its UK filing in pursuit of a license.
- It is likely, but not a given, that the parties will see the arbitration proceeding through. They could also reach an agreement on specific terms, in which case the arbitration would be discontinued.
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Why no serious predictions were possible
I actually offered a bet against an AI prediction that the dispute would settle in Q3 (which prediction was subsequently broadened by also including Q4), and I would have won that one. The arbitration agreement was concluded on May 31, 2026. If one made the (reasonable) point that an agreement to arbitrate is not a complete settlement, it would still be highly unlikely that the arbitration itself will be settled in July or August 2026. It will basically just start then.
Apart from massive mistakes in earlier third-party predictions (such as describing a stayed U.S. case as a potential settlement driver or claiming that adverse results on video patents would affect the value of InterDigital’s entire portfolio), there were other issues.
In particular, none of those attempts to predict developments referenced the InterDigital v. Disney dispute, in which multiple injunctions have come down, the next one looms large, yet there is no deal in place. We discussed the practical problems of SEP enforcement against video streamers last month (May 17, 2026 ip fray article). Any analysis based on how things work for wireless SEPs was inherently unreliable. Streaming is different.
In a scenario where a UK rate determination would have been appealed while various enforcement actions would have come to judgment, the dispute could also have taken a few years. Case in point, Broadcom and Netflix have been litigating for about six years.
It always was (as I stated) possible that they settle. Some disputes settle within a day of the initial court filing. There just wasn’t a reliable basis for high levels of confidence in any particular period. The first-instance UK proceedings would have been costly, the initial rate-setting decision might not have been to InterDigital’s liking, but there would have been an appeal.
It is now best to await an announcement by InterDigital when the arbitration has been concluded (be it by means of a decision or a complete settlement), and to analyze the numbers then. For Samsung, arbitration with InterDigital did not go all that well (February 10, 2026 ip fray article).