UPC grants InterDigital 11-country injunction against Disney’s streaming services: FRAND defense failed in unusual way; €8M (not €500M) security

Context: Based on how a hearing in the UPC’s Mannheim Local Division (LD) went early last month, we predicted that InterDigital would win an injunction against The Walt Disney Company’s streaming services (May 5, 2026 ip fray article). In our analysis, a pre-hearing order already made InterDigital much more likely to win than Disney (April 24, 2026 ip fray article).

What’s new: The outcome validates ip fray‘s prediction. Today, the Mannheim LD handed down its decision, and InterDigital has indeed won. The patent is valid and essential to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) standard. Disney’s fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing defense failed on what appears to be an unprecedented basis: Disney’s refusal to allow InterDigital to present the full negotiation record to the UPC. The court was skeptical of HEVC encoding claims conferring market power, but did not have to resolve that question.

Direct impact: It is difficult to obtain an enforcement stay from the UPC’s Court of Appeal (CoA), and the security amount of €8M (despite Disney averring that enforcement would cause annual damages amounting to €500M) will not dissuade InterDigital from enforcing. Normally, all of this would pave the way of a settlement, but Disney has shown extraordinary resilience even in the face of three German injunctions (May 17, 2026 ip fray article).

Wider ramifications:

• If not for Disney’s obstructive conduct that provoked short shrift, this case would have had the potential for a landmark ruling addressing various streaming-related FRAND questions.
• If the CoA does not raise the security amount, or not by much, many plaintiffs will be more confident of being able to afford the enforcement of UPC injunctions than that of German injunctions during an appeal. The Munich Higher Regional Court stated in an InterDigital v. Disney case (and referenced that one in a more recent Broadcom v. Renault case) a doctrine that could lead to very high security amounts.
• In a parallel InterDigital litigation campaign against a major streamer, Amazon, the parties publicly disagree as to the effects of an arbitration agreement (June 12, 2026 ip fray article).
• Without mentioning any particular court or decision, today’s ruling also rejects a claim often made by UK judges: “[A]ny assertions that injunctions would be granted de facto without examination and in continuation of an alleged ‘German court practice’, are unfounded and not based on supportive data.”