Our articles related to video streaming patents are available free of charge.
Context:
- In the summer, the 7th Civil Chamber of the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court), represented by Presiding Judge Dr. Oliver Schoen (“Schön” in German), warned litigants against leveraging jurisdictional imperialism (July 18, 2025 ip fray article), threatening decisive measures to thwart foreign interference along the lines of anti-antisuit injunctions (AASIs). From the beginning, ip fray was confident that the Unified Patent Court (UPC) might take similar action.
- In late August, a pre-emptive UK FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) action by Amazon against InterDigital became known (August 29, 2025 LinkedIn post by ip fray).
What’s new:
- The UPC’s Mannheim Local Division (LD) and the Munich I Regional Court’s 21st Civl Chamber (Presiding Judge: Dr. Georg Werner) have each granted research and licensing firm InterDigital an anti-interim-license injunction (AILI) against Amazon, barring the e-commerce, cloud and (which is most relevant here) streaming giant from seeking a forcible interim license in the High Court of Justice for England & Wales (EWHC) or a declaration according to which InterDigital would be held in breach of its FRAND licensing obligations for not granting an interim license.
- The AILIs came down without requiring the prior filing of infringement actions.
Direct impact:
- The two AILIs came down as ex parte preliminary injunctions (PIs), i.e., without hearing Amazon, which can request the Munich court to conduct a hearing, but the likelihood of the court changing its position is negligible. Amazon can appeal the decisions to the UPC’s Court of Appeal (CoA) and, after a Munich hearing, to the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Higher Regional Court). We doubt that the judges of either appeals court will savor the notion of foreign courts encroaching on their jurisdiction and compromising patent rights. The Munich Higher Regional Court affirmed the Nokia v. Continental AASI in 2019.
- The UPC will fine Amazon up to €250K per day of non-compliance with the order. The Munich I Regional Court will impose up to €250K per each violation, and in practice this means that the amount can be imposed multiple times. It also reserves the right to order the imprisonment of Amazon executives.
- Amazon must withdraw any pending applications shortly. Game over.
Wider ramifications:
- These orders are not binding on other parties, but Samsung may realize now that it is time to withdraw its UK action against ZTE (June 27, 2025 ip fray article), and Acer, ASUS and Hisense will have to reconsider their UK litigation tactics against Nokia (September 10, 2025 ip fray article). ASUS already has the problem that Xiaomi is arguing that what is good for the goose is good for the gander (September 9, 2025 ip fray article). And MediaTek (April 15, 2025 ip fray article) must watch out.
- The law firm of Arnold Ruess won the first-ever German AASI (Nokia v. Continental, 2019), first-ever German affirmance of an AASI by an appeals court (same case), first-ever German AAAASI (InterDigital v. Xiaomi), first-ever AASI by any Mannheim-based court (May 30, 2025 ip fray article), and now the first AILIs.
- Amazon already went further than other implementers of standards in seeking leverage in the UK against Nokia (February 2, 2025 ip fray article), but the case settled before an interim license was imposed (March 31, 2025 ip fray article).
- This is already the third major IP-related news coming out of the Munich I Regional Court in eight days:
- Last Thursday, the court granted a patent PI for more than 20 countries in a pharma case (September 29, 2025 ip fray article).
- On Monday (September 29, 2025 ai fray article), a music rights collecting society had its day in court against OpenAI, which is represented by a patent litigation firm (and losing). The world’s leading AI copyright litigation blog, which is maintained by a California professor, picked up our analysis.
- After the Munich I Regional Court’s guidance and the UPC’s first-ever UK injunction, an opinion piece said those developments marginalized the UK’s role in patent litigation (July 19, 2025 ip fray article). Of course, we believe in symmetry and the UK could warm up to cross-border patent rulings now. Furthermore, it could attract AI copyright cases. However, the UK government’s standard-essential patent (SEP) initiative (July 15, 2025 ip fray article) is a pure waste of taxpayers’ money as the UPC and German courts found an antidote.
Swift decisions
The motions were brought and adjudicated (within days of filing) in late September.
Specific performance vs. mere declaration
Amazon took positions in the UK litigation according to which the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) FRAND pledge entitled Amazon to an interim license, which in turn means Amazon was about to seek specific performance (i.e., an injunction that orders the other party to take a step as opposed to a prohibitive injunction) to the effect of obtaining an interim license. The assertion that the SEP holder must grant an interim license is a position not taken so far by those seeking a FRAND determination for cellular (typically 4G or 5G) SEPs.
A license is a complete defense to patent infringement; a license that the patentee is obligated to grant is, therefore, the next best thing to an antisuit injunction (ASI).
But neither the UPC’s Mannheim LD nor the Munich I Regional Court’s 21st Civil Chamber stop there. Both decisions bar Amazon not only from attempting to force InterDigital to grant an actual interim licenses, but also from seeking a declaration finding InterDigital in breach of its FRAND licensing obligations for declining to grant such a license.
In that regard, the decisions arguably go beyond what the Munich I Regional Court’s 7th Civil Chamber said in its guidance in July, which expressed skepticism regarding the UK approach but appeared to draw the line between mere declarations and directly coercive measures. However, the UPC’s Mannheim LD and the Munich I Regional Court’s 21st Civil Chamber correctly identified the problem that even a mere declaration can have, or threatens to lead to, adverse effects on the patentee’s rights and could therefore have a coercive effect in their own right.
UPC discusses expansion of UK interim license regime after Panasonic v. Xiaomi
The Mannheim LD’s decision contains a complete, accurate and thoughtful account of how the UK judiciary developed its interim license case law starting with Xiaomi’s request for an interim license from Panasonic (October 3, 2024 ip fray article). It is an interesting coincidence that it took less than one year for the UPC and the Munich I Regional Court since that first UK interim-license declaration to finish it off for good.
The UPC decision does recognize that the Panasonic-Xiaomi dispute had a unique element: both parties had given an undertaking to the EWHC. But in the dispute between Ericsson and Lenovo, that was no longer the case. The EWHC denied an interim license, but the England & Wales Court of Appeal (EWCA) went off the deep end and considered the presence of mutual undertakings dispensable (February 28, 2025 ip fray article). A few months ago, the EWHC issued an illogical decision in Samsung v. ZTE (June 25, 2025 ip fray article) that was tantamount to saying that the UK judiciary is the way and the light, and other courts are inferior. Now some UK judges can see that the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily agree with them.
A famous Spanish saying (“Tanto va el cántaro a la fuente que al fin se rompe”) is commonly translated “the pitcher goes to the well until it breaks.” The UK situation had become a travesty, but it’s all over now.
No infringement action pending in UPC yet
In order to obtain these AILIs, InterDigital was not even required to bring infringement actions first. The mere fact that the UK proceedings would have the potential to discourage InterDigital from doing so was a sufficient basis for enjoining Amazon.
Security
The UPC has in other situations refrained from a security requirement for the enforcement of AASIs. In this case, the requirement of €400K is rather low and merely meant to cover the costs of proceedings.
Brazil
It turns out that Amazon also brought declaratory judgment (DJ) actions over 18 Brazilian patents held by InterDigital and an ASI within Brazil. The UPC and the Munich I Regional Court do not take action against ASIs or interim licenses that do not affect the patents enforceable in the UPC or Germany. They may, however, take such behavior into consideration when determining an implementer’s (un)willingness to take a FRAND license.
SEPs or not?
Technically, the patents with respect to which Amazon is seeking a FRAND license on UK-determined terms are SEPs only to the extent that Amazon products or services decode video. Encoding claims are not subject to the ITU FRAND pledge. But some UK judges have previously shown a tendency to consider issuing interim-license declarations even to patents that are undisputedly not SEPs.
Courts and counsel
UPC Mannheim LD (case no. UPC_CFI_936/2025): Presiding Judge (and here, judge-rapporteur) Prof. Peter Tochtermann, Judge Dirk Boettcher (“Böttcher” in German) and Judge András Kupecz (a Dutch national primarily assigned to the Munich seat of the Central Division).
Munich I Regional Court (case no. 21 O 12112/25): Presiding Judge Dr. Georg Werner, Judge Dr. Sebastian Benz and Judge Tözsér. In an April 2025 court document, Judge Dr. Benz is listed as Presiding Judge Dr. Werner’s deputy, and Judge Tözsér as the deputy of Presiding Judge Dr. Schoen of the 7th Division.
Arnold Ruess’s Cordula Schumacher, Dr. Arno Risse (“Riße” in German; he masterminded the 2019 AASI against Continental), Dr. Lisa Rieth, Anja Penners und Julija Kravtsova. On the UPC and German InterDigital v. Amazon cases, they are working together with df-mp patent attorney Dr. Dominik Ho.