Context:
- Early last month, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) obtained a UK antisuit injunction against Nokia (November 5, 2025 ip fray article).
- Another dispute between Nokia and a major streaming company is the one with Paramount, which expanded to Europe this fall (October 1, 2025 ip fray article).
- In late November, Paramount followed in WBD’s footsteps and requested a UK antisuit injunction, too.
What’s new: Today Mr Justice Meade of the High Court of Justice for England & Wales (EWHC) held a combined hearing in those cases. Nokia had requested reconsideration of the ex parte injunction granted to WBD, and Paramount wanted to obtain one. Nokia argued that no such injunction was warranted, given that Nokia had not sought in a foreign court, such as the Unified Patent Court (UPC) or the Munich I Regional Court, the kind of injunction WBD feared. In order to prevent escalation, Nokia proposed mutual contractual undertakings under which Nokia would give 21 days’ notice prior to seeking a foreign injunction against the UK proceedings, and WBD or Paramount would give seven days’ notice ahead of seeking antisuit relief themselves. While WBD’s counsel insisted on an undertaking to the court, Mr Justice Meade took Nokia’s conduct into consideration and concluded that the streamers would have to content themselves with contractual undertakings. That mechanism is not without UK precedent (Cook v. Boston).
Direct impact:
- An undertaking to the court, as the streamers would have preferred, would have had the effect of an injunction, with any finding of a breach giving rise to painful sanctions.
- By contrast, a contractual undertaking would only enable breach-of-contract claims, but there would be no contempt-of-court penalties. Therefore, Nokia could in certain circumstances reconsider.
Wider ramifications:
- It appears that the EWHC seeks to incentivize compliant conduct. InterDigital and Nokia are different companies with different strategic interests. InterDigital has only one revenue source to offset its research and development costs, and must be particularly protective of it.
- Whether this treatment of Nokia serves to de-escalate the open conflict between the UK judiciary and its continential European counterparts (and at some point also other jurisdictions such as Brazil, which haven’t pushed back against UK jurisdictional imperialism yet) is doubtful.
The only solution to put an end to the UK-EU conflict is for the UK courts to realize that there is no legitimate reason for which they should be the global FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) arbiter even in disputes involving non-UK companies (such as a Finnish and a U.S. company, or two U.S. companies) and non-UK contract law (Swiss law in connection with International Telecommunications Union (ICU) video standards). Some of the recent clarifications in Amazon v. InterDigital addressed some of the UPC’s concerns, but fell short of eliminating the potential for conflict (November 25, 2025 ip fray article).
Latest Munich decision in InterDigital v. Amazon
At today’s hearing, counsel for WBD made reference to a very recent decision by which the Munich I Regional Court’s 21st Civil Chamber affirmed, after a hearing, its ex parte anti-interim-license injunction (AILI) against Amazon. WBD’s lawyer noted that the Munich court is apparently prepared not only to order injunctive relief against interim licenses but also final relief at the end of full-blown UK proceedings. That is a correct interpretation, and it’s also consistent with what Presiding Judge Professor Peter Tochtermann of the UPC’s Mannheim Local Division (LD) explained at a hearing last month. The concern of those courts is over restrictions on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, not over the stage of proceeding at which they are imposed.
Here’s an unofficial English-language translation of the redacted version of the latest Munich ruling:
On Wednesday and Thursday (December 3 and 4, 2025), Mr Justice Meade will hear InterDigital’s jurisdictional challenge to Amazon’s UK FRAND action. This is a busy FRAND hearing week for the patent litigator-turned-judge.