Our articles related to video streaming patents are available free of charge.
Context: In August, Nokia filed parallel patent infringement lawsuits against world-famous media conglomerate Paramount in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware and the Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) State Court, enforcing 13 of its video-related patents in the former (August 22, 2025 ip fray article).
What’s new: Nokia has now also sued Paramount in the Unified Patent Court’s Mannheim Local Division (LD) and the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court). It is enforcing three video-related patents.
Direct impact: This could potentially be a big a blow to Paramount in Europe, which currently owns 8% of the European video streaming market through its streaming services Paramount+ (for the UK and Ireland, as well as UPC Member States such as Germany and France) and SkyShowtime (for many other UPC Member States, such as Denmark, Finland, Spain, and the Netherlands). The company trails behind Prime Video (24%), Netflix (23%), and Disney+ (19%), but its service has more than 10 million subscribers and has an estimated annual revenue of more than $1 billion.
Wider ramifications: These suits add to Nokia’s increasing docket of video-related patent infringement cases, which have so far been quite successful. Since July 2024, it has inked amicable bilateral license agreements with four direct-to-consumer video streaming companies, as well as deals following disputes with Amazon (March 31, 2025 ip fray article) and HP (October 30, 2024 LinkedIn post by ip fray). It recently also launched a campaign against Acer, Asus and Hisense in the United States International Trade Commission (ITC), the UPC, India, Germany, and Brazil (June 26, 2025 ip fray article).
In a statement today, Nokia said:
“Companies providing video streaming services enjoy huge benefits from the research and development conducted by Nokia. Without this innovation, streaming services would not work the way that consumers have come to expect. Nokia reinvests the compensation we receive for the use of our video technologies in developing next generation multimedia technologies. Our preference is to avoid litigation, but Paramount left us with no choice. We hope that Paramount accepts their obligation and pays for the use of our technologies in their streaming services.”
The patents-in-suit include:
- EP4250732 (“Motion prediction in video coding”)
- EP4099700 (“Motion prediction in video coding”)
- EP2130150 (“Systems, methods, devices, and computer program products for arranging a user’s media files”)
The first patent is being asserted in the UPC, while the latter two are being asserted in the Munich I Regional Court.
Both EP4250732 and EP4099700 are based on encoding claims. As we previously reported, the ITC initial determination in the Amazon case found that encoding is not standard-essential (January 9, 2025 ip fray article). There are no publicly-known court decisions in Europe so far on this, but it is possible they take the same view as the ITC because the standard does not standardize the encoding.
Counsel
Nokia is being represented by Arnold Ruess‘s (attorneys-at-law) Cordula Schumacher, Arno Risse (“Riße” in German), Jan Wergin, and Tim Smentkowski, as well as a team of patent attorneys at Cohausz & Florack: Christoph Walke, Matthias Waters, and Lars Grannemann.
New Paramount chief legal officer
Paramount’s Skydance is also due to welcome a new Chief Legal Officer next week: Makan Delrahim, who was formerly Assistant Attorney General overseeing the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division (during Trump’s first term), and, most recently, a partner at Latham & Watkins (September 25, 2025 Paramount press release).
Mr. Delrahim is known for his pro-SEP advocacy during his time at the DOJ, including when he most notably filed an amicus brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in FTC v. Qualcomm, seeking to dissuade the Judge overseeing the case from ordering injunctive remedies against the chipset maker.
Mr. Delrahim also led some of the division’s largest Big Tech investigations, including:
- the first major monopoly case in about 20 years against Google;
- the attempt to block Visa from acquiring a nascent competitor in fintech (which the companies abandoned before the case went to trial); and
- the attempt to block AT&T and Time Warner from merging (although that was unsuccessful).