Context:
- Yesterday, InterDigital announced an arbitration agreement with Amazon (agreement to resolve their video patent licensing dispute through arbitration instead of litigation (June 11, 2026 ip fray article).
- Today, we obtained a UK court order that stays various procedural deadlines and shows the agreement was reached in late May (June 12, 2026 ip fray article).
What’s new: Amazon has issued a public statement disagreeing with InterDigital’s announcement, and InterDigital disagrees with Amazon’s statement.
An Amazon spokesperson responded to our inquiry as follows: “InterDigital’s press release is inaccurate. While we are in negotiations regarding an arbitration process, no agreement has yet been signed. Amazon and InterDigital have not yet entered into a patent license agreement and our ongoing litigations with InterDigital have not yet resolved.”
An InterDigital spokesperson responded as follows:
“There is nothing inaccurate in our press release. As you can see from the consent order filed with the High Court yesterday by both parties, the parties have reached an agreement to determine the RAND terms of a license in arbitration. An unavoidable result of that agreement to arbitrate and resulting license is the resolution of all litigation.”
Direct impact:
- As our previous article noted, Mr Justice Meade stayed various procedural deadlines. That means the UK case is pending, and we see no withdrawals in the UPC either.
- But some kind of agreement appears to exist. If the parties disagree on what that means, then there is potential for another litigation prong.
Wider ramifications: This is an unprecedented situation. We were aware of some disagreements between InterDigital and Lenovo after their arbitration agreement, but that was just a matter of “spin”, not substance.
ip fray never said that a “patent license agreement” had been signed. Therefore, we take note of Amazon denying that this is the case, but it was not our understanding anyway. Also, we made it clear that no complete settlement had been reached. We didn’t adopt InterDigital’s wording, but looked at it from a different angle. Therefore, we have nothing to correct or retract. We do, however, welcome new information, preferably in the form of court orders.
Our take is consistent with Mr Justice Meade’s (soon Lord Justice Meade) understanding of the situation: an agreement resulted from an exchange of letters between the parties, and it’s an agreement to have licensing terms determined through arbitration. You can find the order toward the end of this article.
Amazon’s problem is that its whole UK-centric strategy does not have the same potential for leverage anymore as it had before the May 12 Nokia v. Acer & ASUS ruling, which makes an arbitration offer a safe harbor from UK global FRAND jurisdiction.
InterDigital’s problem is that the UPC’s Court of Appeal expressed an inclination to interpret the Mannheim anti-interference injunction narrowly and, due to a UK court order, InterDigital’s counsel was not even able to argue with full force why the Mannheim LD’s interpretation was correct.
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