Context: On Saturday (December 20, 2025) morning, ip fray reported on having discovered Hisense Group on the list of HEVC Advance licensees. Five hours earlier, we reported on two Brazilian preliminary injunctions (PIs) that Access Advance licensors JVCKENWOOD (JVC) and NEC had obtained (December 19, 2025 ip fray article). The sequence of events strongly suggested to us that the PIs drove the settlement, given that parties who have settled a dispute typically call a court and ask not to hand down a decision that is in the making (or, in this case, the parties could have told the judge in open court that a decision was no longer needed).
What’s new: Today we received an email from the Dusseldorf office of the CMS law firm,
- writing on behalf of Hisense Visual Technology Ltd. and affiliates (hereinafter “Hisense”),
- calling it “inaccurate to assert that a license agreement has been signed subsequent [sic] to the Brazilian court’s issuance of a preliminary injunction,”
- asserting that “[t]he parties proceeded with the signing of the license agreement without first ascertaining the outcome of the litigation, and in any event before the Brazilian court handed down its decision,”
- “demand[ing] that the incorrect statements on the blog be removed immediately,” and
- “reserv[ing] [their] client’s rights to initiate legal action if the aforementioned statement is not removed by the end of business today.” (in the email, the bold-face part was not in bold face, but underlined).
I was working on a (brief) second-anniversary article because ip fray launched two years ago to the day. Then I had to deal with this.
Florian Mueller
We are always quick to make changes that are warranted. Numerous lawyers and law firm marketing managers have reached out to us about our counsel lists, and we have never hesitated to update LinkedIn posts and/or articles, just to ensure that everyone was credited. And we have made a couple of factual corrections as well. Sometimes it’s necessary.
In this case, if Hisense had simply communicated that the license agreement already had been, or was in the process of being, concluded before the Brazilian PIs came down, we would definitely have modified the article accordingly, given that our reporting was based on publicly available facts and we cannot know what happened behind the scenes. Our interpretation was reasonable, but not only can’t we disprove what Hisense says: we don’t have a basis to doubt it, such as a statement by an equally well-informed party contradicting theirs.
So what do we believe was actually going on, and why?
The most plausible explanation is that Hisense anticipated the PIs. The court-appointed expert made his report available ahead of the hearing. That means the more critical one of the two injunctions (the one in JVC’s favor) was foreseeable. (So was the NEC PI, but merely urgency-based PIs are much less impactful.)
What would not be plausible (and which is not what Hisense said) is that the timing was purely coincidental. In 2013, WilmerHale partner Bill Lee told a U.S. judge in Apple v. Samsung: “I’m old enough not to believe in coincidences anymore.”
Normally, parties inform a court of a settlement even during a hearing or trial (such as Apple and Qualcomm in San Diego in 2019) and shortly before a decision is handed down (such as Samsung Display and BOE, who notified the U.S. International Trade Commission 44 minutes prior to the publication of an already-made decision: November 19, 2025 ip fray article).
Hisense denies that the license agreement was signed after the Brazilian decision came down, and we take their word for it. Apparently there wasn’t enough time left to tell the Brazilian court that no decision was needed anymore.
We updated the article accordingly. Hisense’s counsel insists that there was no threat. With the quotes provided further above, we leave it to our audience to judge whether our interpretation of the combination of an ultimatum with reference to legal action against us is more or less reasonable than theirs.
We are committed to accuracy, and we will continue to exercise our free-speech rights:
- If you wish to inform us of relevant facts, you don’t have to threaten. We’ll gladly edit and/or do follow-ups to our articles because we owe it to our readers.
- If you think you can intimidate us in order to suppress the truth or restrict our fundamental freedoms, you’ll be barking up the wrong tree. But we’ll still strive to report accurately on your cases because our readers come first.