Context: Earlier this month, Nokia sued PC makers Acer and ASUS (long form: ASUSTeK) as well as smart TV maker Hisense in Germany and the Unified Patent Court (UPC) over several unknown patents. In a corporate blog post at the time, the company’s consumer electronics licensing program head, Philippe Lanet, noted that Nokia merely seeks “to ensure fair compensation” (April 1, 2025 ip fray article). Less than a week later, Nokia also brought suits against ASUS in the Central District of California, Hisense in the Northern District of Georgia, and Acer in the Western District of Texas. Its latter suit was assigned to Judge Alan Albright (April 8, 2025 LinkedIn post), and in all three cases, it is enforcing the same five video coding-related patents (listed below the box).
What’s new: Nokia today filed a complaint in the United States International Trade Commission (USITC, or just ITC) against the same three defendants, covering four of the five patents it asserted in the U.S. federal lawsuits.
Direct impact and wider ramifications: This fresh action undoubtedly ramps up its enforcement campaign against the consumer electronics makers. The company has evidently avoided asserting the fifth patent involved in the Western District of Texas cases because that patent (U.S. Patent No. 7,532,808) expires in December 2025 – they wouldn’t get the import ban before it expires. Meanwhile, if the district court cases got decided later, there would still be the possibility of recovering damages for past infringement up to the expiration date.
The four patents in both the ITC complaint and in all three district cases include:
- U.S. Patent No. 10,536,714 (“Method for coding and an apparatus”)
- U.S. Patent No. 11,805,267 (“Motion prediction in video coding”)
- U.S. Patent No. 8,050,321 (“Grouping of image frames in video coding”)
- U.S. Patent No. 9,036,701 (“Method and apparatus for providing complexity balanced entropy coding”)
The investigation is discoverable under No. 337-TA-_ and is entitled “Certain Video-capable Laptop, Desktop Computers, Handheld Computers, Tablets, Televisions, Projectors, and Components and Modules Thereof.”
The fifth patent-in-suit, which they are pursuing in the district courts but not in the ITC (because it will expire on December 11, 2025, but over which they can still pursue damages in court) is:
- U.S. Patent No. 7,532,808 (“Method for coding motion in a video sequence”)
Today’s action also comes shortly after Nokia and Amazon settled their long-running global litigation with a patent licensing agreement – Nokia’s first with a major streaming platform (March 31, 2025 ip fray article).
During that dispute, Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Cameron Elliot of the ITC had sided with Nokia over four of five patents-in-suit and recommended a U.S. import ban against Amazon streaming devices (December 21, 2024 ip fray article). Then, in January, ALJ Doris Johnson Hines handed Nokia another preliminary ITC win over Amazon (January 30, 2025 ip fray article). Nokia prevailed on five patents over Amazon in those decisions (not final rulings and which would have been subject to review), three of which overlap with those enforced in the U.S. federal lawsuits and the ITC complaint: the ‘714, ‘267 and ‘321 patents.