Context: In May 2026, IBEX PT Holdings sued The Walt Disney Company (Brazil) in Rio de Janeiro state court as part of a Brazilian streaming-patent campaign connected to Access Advance’s Video Distribution Pool (VDP) ecosystem, alongside a parallel Ibex action against Snap over separate patents (May 22, 2026 ip fray article). The suit centers on Brazilian patent BR 11 2014 004914-9 (“Method for encoding an image in an AMVP mode”). It is the Brazilian national-phase counterpart of a patent family that includes U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2014/0079128A1, and claims priority to an application filed on August 29, 2011. This is a technique IBEX says Disney uses when encoding 4K content for Disney+ in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, also known as H.265) format. The 6th Business Court of the Capital District of Rio de Janeiro appointed an independent court expert to answer a set of questions on essentiality, infringement, and validity.
What’s new: The court expert has filed his report (laudo pericial) in the case (no. 3069691-37.2026.8.19.0001). It concludes that Disney’s encoders directly infringe five of the patent’s seven claims (independent claim 1 and dependent claims 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7) when Disney+ imports HEVC-encoded video into Brazil, and that those claims satisfy the novelty and inventive-step requirements under Brazil’s Industrial Property Law (LPI). Meanwhile, the expert found the patent is not essential to the H.265/HEVC standard, because it claims an encoding method while HEVC formally standardizes only decoding, a characterization that matches IBEX’s own litigation theory, since a non-essential patent lets IBEX avoid having to prove Disney’s compliance (or non-compliance) with fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms.
Direct impact: If the presiding judge adopts the report, IBEX will have overcome the two central defenses in Disney’s counterclaim, non-infringement and invalidity for lack of inventive step. While Disney’s remaining argument, that it does not itself encode or decode video inside Brazil, is undercut by the expert’s finding that liability attaches to Disney’s importation of bitstreams already encoded using the patented method, under Article 42(II) of the LPI. Because the patent was found non-essential, Disney cannot use a FRAND-compliance shortfall by IBEX or Access Advance as a shield, though the expert also found no evidence that Disney has taken or negotiated a license. This leaves that question for the judge to weigh in deciding whether to grant relief such as an injunction.
Wider ramifications: The report follows a pattern already set in Brazil. A court-appointed expert reached a similar conclusion in InterDigital’s separate campaign against Disney, finding that Disney’s encoder-side conduct was not subject to a RAND obligation, ahead of a preliminary injunction there (September 11, 2025 ip fray article). For Access Advance’s VDP pool, which already leans on its own publicly posted royalty schedule rather than a formal essentiality declaration, a second favorable technical finding on the “encoding claims escape FRAND” theory strengthens the pool’s leverage against video streamers that decline a license. Disney faces a structurally similar dispute in the parallel Ibex case against Snap over the same VDP-linked patent portfolio (May 22, 2026 ip fray article) and the reasoning here that importing an HEVC bitstream already encoded elsewhere is what triggers liability in Brazil is likely to resurface there and in future streaming cases.
Here is a copy of the expert report in Portuguese (Brazil), dated August 6, 2026:
Encoding, not decoding
The heart of the report is a distinction that recurs throughout: H.265/HEVC, as a formal standard jointly developed by the ITU-T and the ISO/IEC, standardizes how a decoder reconstructs video, not how an encoder compresses it in the first place. Because BR 914 claims an encoding method, the expert found it is “not essential” to HEVC in the formal sense, and noted that IBEX never declared it essential in the proceedings. IBEX’s own initial filing embraced that framing, arguing that encoding-side technology is optional rather than mandatory under the standard’s technical specification, which, in turn, is what let IBEX sidestep a FRAND-compliance showing altogether.
The report adds a qualification that keeps the finding from being a clean win for implementers: encoding methods “intrinsically related to the data format required by the standards for decoders may become de facto mandatory” for any complete streaming system wanting standard compliance, since claims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 “contemplate the syntax provided by the H.265/HEVC method”. In other words, an HEVC-compliant decoder requires a bitstream that only a compatible encoder one practicing those claims can produce.
Infringement, minus one claim
On the merits, the expert sided with IBEX on eight of the nine controversial technical points Disney raised, rejecting Disney’s arguments that its x265-based encoding pipeline does not use multiple spatial and temporal AMVP candidates, does not average quantization parameters the way the patent requires, and does not select spatial candidates based on prediction-unit position. The one point where the expert agreed with Disney concerned dependent claim 6: the expert found that the specific blocks HEVC and the x265 encoder actually treat as temporal candidates do not match the “bottom left” and “top left” blocks recited in that claim, so claim 6 was excluded from the infringement finding.
On territoriality, Disney had argued it neither encodes nor decodes video within Brazil. The expert did not dispute that premise but found it beside the point. Liability under Article 42(II) of the LPI attaches to importing “a product obtained directly by a patented process”. The expert’s tests on video files supplied by IBEX, together with a technical opinion by Dr. Rodrigo De Lamare, found that Disney+’s Brazilian bitstreams reflect encoding via the non-merge, inter-AMVP path the patent claims, regardless of where the underlying encoding took place.
FRAND question left open, not resolved
The non-essentiality finding let the expert treat most FRAND-related questions from Disney as moot. Still, the report addressed several of them. It found no evidence in the record that Access Advance double-collects royalties from device makers and content distributors for the same patents. It also found that a uniform tariff, such as the one on the VDP’s public rate card, cited as having eight licensees as of August 5, 2026, would be a non-discriminatory pricing approach if FRAND analysis were required. But the expert declined to rule on whether Disney’s conduct satisfies FRAND, calling that question either moot or reserved for the judge.
Court and counsel
Court: Acting Judge Victor Agustin Jaccoud Diz Torres of the 6th Business Court of the Capital District of Rio de Janeiro.
Court-appointed expert: Dr. David Fernandes Cruz Moura, assisted by JoĂŁo Abdalla Ney da Silva.
IBEX Tecnologia Ltda. is being represented by Licks Attorneys’ Otto Licks, Rodolfo Pinto Barreto, Abel Gomes, Bruno Falque, Élcio de Lacerda, and Amanda Terra, together with Salomão Advogados’ Paulo Cesar Salomão Filho, Luis Felipe Salomão Filho, and Alice Studart da Fonseca.