BREAKING: Huawei sues Meta in UPC, Brazil over video patents

Context: On Tuesday, a video patent infringement lawsuit by Huawei against The Walt Disney Company was discovered in the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Mannheim Local Division (LD) (March 10, 2026 ip fray article). Previous Huawei cases over video patents include actions against Roku and Transsion as part of collective Access Advance disputes, which resulted in both licensees taking a license to Advance’s HEVC pool (Roku: July 28, 2025 ip fray article and Transsion: December 1, 2025 ip fray article).

What’s new:

• On February 20, 2026, Huawei filed an enforcement action in the UPC’s Mannheim LD against Meta/Facebook (nine legal entities) over EP3471419 (“Gradual temporal layer access pictures in video compression”), a High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, H.265) patent. The court made that lawsuit discoverable today.
• There is also a case in the UPC’s Munich LD over EP2725797 (“Offset decoding device, offset encoding device, image filter device, and data structure”).
• In the 6th Business Court of the Rio de Janeiro State Court, Brazilian patent BR 112013034060-6 (encoding and decoding methods and devices) is being asserted

Direct impact: Meta could seek a bilateral license or take a pool license from Access Advance. The latter would also resolve disputes with Philips and ETRI (January 26, 2026 ip fray article).

Wider ramifications:

• This is another major video streaming patent dispute, and the UPC is a key venue for that category of cases, as is the Rio de Janeiro State Court.
• The Mannheim LD has demonstrated, and continues to demonstrate, in another video streaming dispute (InterDigital v. Amazon) that it does not condone efforts to undermine the UPC’s jurisdiction through attempts to leverage extraterritorial overreach by foreign courts (March 9, 2026 ip fray article).