Context: As noted on LinkedIn, the seven-day period from October 25 to 31, 2024, will go down in history as the busiest one in the standard-essential patent (SEP)news arena to date. On Friday, Panasonic settled its disputes with Xiaomi and OPPO (October 25, 2024 ip fray article). Also, a new dispute between ZTE and Lenovo became discoverable in the UK (October 27, 2024 ip fray article). InterDigital settled with OPPO, after almost three years (October 29, 2024 ip fray article). Two major court hearings are coming up: today (Wednesday), Huawei v. Netgear in the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Munich Local Division (LD), and tomorrow, VoiceAge EVS v. HMD in the Munich Higher Regional Court. And three more things happened yesterday that ip fray instantly shared on LinkedIn.
What’s new: Yesterday (October 29, 2024), Nokia announced a multi-year patent license agreement with HP (Nokia press release and LinkedIn post by ip fray) settling litigation in the U.S., Brazil, Germany and the UPC. Then ip fray discovered HP as well as TCL among the licensees listed on the website of patent pool administration firm Access Advance (October 29, 2024 LinkedIn post by ip fray). Those pool license agreements settle disputes in the UPC, the U.S., China and potentially more jurisdictions.
Direct impact: For the licensing programs of Nokia and Access Advance, those agreements represent very significant progress. And HP has near-simultaneously resolved two major SEP disputes.
Wider ramifications: Video technologies are a major growth segment for SEP holders. This year, Nokia announced two license agreements with major video streaming platforms (without naming them for now). The settlements also do away with certain lawfare against collective licensing: in China, TCL was seeking a FRAND rate determination against the Access Advance pool, and HP was suing Access Advance in Massachusetts state court (a case that was then removed to a federal court, from where HP tried to get it sent back).
All three license deals discussed in this article are similarly important. For easier reference, the article is divided into two parts:
1. Nokia’s license agreement with HP
Nokia’s Chief Licensing Offer New Segments, Arvin Patel, celebrated this deal on LinkedIn and is quoted in the company’s press release saying the agreement “recognizes Nokia’s leadership in video and multimedia technologies and [its] decades-long investments in R&D.” In the press release, the company describes itself as “a leader in the development of video and multimedia technologies, including video compression, content delivery, content recommendation and aspects related to hardware,” and claims to have “created almost 5,000 inventions that enable multimedia products and services” over the course of 25 years.
The press release also points to a section of Nokia’s corporate website that discusses its consumer electronics and, particularly, multimedia patents.
Last month, Nokia won a German streaming patent injunction against Amazon (September 20, 2024 ip fray article), which it started enforcing on October 7, 2024 (LinkedIn post by ip fray).
As a result of Nokia’s ability to settle most of its SEP disputes rather quickly, the UPC has yet to hold a hearing in a case brought by Nokia. A license agreement with payment terminal maker Verifone was announced in the summer (August 14, 2024 ip fray article), and now Nokia has also settled with HP.
Nokia’s long-time IP leader Jenni Lukander has handed over the reins, on an interim basis for now, to Patrik Hammarén (October 18, 2024 ip fray article) at a time where all major smartphone license deals are in place and significant progress is being made in video and IoT licensing.
2. Access Advance’s license agreements with HP and TCL
Access Advance is one of the transparent patent pools that list their licensees on their websites. In an IoT context, ip fray will talk about disclosiures of licensees soon.
The appearance of HP and TCL on the list means that the related disputes have been settled:
- HP:
- Access Advance licensor Dolby was suing HP in the UPC’s Dusseldorf LD. After HP raised FRAND arguments relating to Access Advance’s pool licensing terms. the pool administrator asked, and was allowed, to intervene (June 26, 2024 ip fray article).
- HP sued Access Advance in Massachusetts state court over arguments similar to its FRAND defense in the UPC. Access Advance triggered the removal of the case from the state court to a federal court (the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts), from where HP wanted it to be sent back. The court(s) won’t have to deal with that jurisdictional question anymore.
- TCL:
- Access Advance licensor NEC was suing TCL in the Munich LD, where the pool administrator was also allowed to intervene (item 2.1 of an October 4, 2024 ip fray article).
- In China, TCL was seeking a pool-level FRAND determination. The Supreme People’s Court held that, in principle, a Chinese court had jurisdiction over that question (June 27, 2024 ip fray article), though if one looked at the decision more closely, the decision was in no small part about which of two Chinese courts should hear the matter (September 3, 2024 ip fray article). There were some key questions left to be resolved, but they won’t be resolved anymore, at least not in this particular dispute.
It appears that neither HP nor TCL had problems with Access Advance that would have been too fundamental to simply be worked out at the negotiating table. UPC injunctions could have made a major impact on both disputes, but weren’t going to come down too soon (the Dusseldorf LD had scheduled a Dolby v. HP trial for June 2025). In other words, there was no indication of patent hold-up. Instead, there were commercial disagreements that have been put aside.