Brazilian judge will decide Dolby’s PI request against Roku on March 23 based on expert testimony; one patent was previously held essential

Context: This is a brief follow-up to our Wednesday (October 15, 2025) article, Dolby’s Brazilian enforcement actions could persuade Roku to become Access Advance licensee, with German court rulings on the horizon.

What’s new: A Brazilian case management order shows that the Rio de Janeiro State Court has elected to order an expert assessment with respect to (not only, but also) the essentiality of the two patents-in-suit, BR 112014010839-0 and BR 112014010842-0. The expert report will be furnished on or before February 23, 2026. The parties may submit comments until March 16, 2026. A week later, on March 23, 2026, a technical hearing will be held, typically followed by a bench ruling.

Direct impact:

• Roku faces a high risk of Dolby prevailing on at least one patent, givent hat BR’842 was previously being litigated against TCL (as we found out from a court document in conjunction with the Darts-ip database), where a court-appointed expert already deemed it essential to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, H.265) standard. Merits-based preliminary injunctions (PIs) take longer in Brazil than urgency-based ones, but when they make impact, they are much harder to get lifted. Given that TCL is also a frequent and sophisticated defendant to standard-essential patent (SEP) litigation, it is clearly more likely than not that the patent will be deemed essential again.
• The fact that Access Advance, on Dolby’s and other patent holders’ behalf, reached out in 2017 and no license agreement has been concluded despite numerous of Roku’s competitors having done so does not mean that there cannot be a FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) defense, but it ups the ante.

Wider ramifications:

• Based on the current schedule, the time from filing to disposition would be less than six months, comparable only to PI proceedings in certain European courts. That is fast and forceful, but also reflective of a deliberate approach taken by the judge in light of the technical complexity of the case.
• In the first quarter of 2026 there will also be a ruling in the German part of the dispute, and presumably well ahead of the Brazilian technical hearing.