The patents-in-suit are video streaming patents, which is why this article is available for free.
Context: Nokia is enforcing video patents, among them a number of standard-essential patents (SEPs), against Acer, ASUS and Hisense. Initially, Nokia sued in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) (April 1, 2025 ip fray article), Germany, the United States (April 11, 2025 ip fray article) and Brazil. It then brought cases in the Delhi High Court (HC) against Hisense and Acer (June 13, 2025 ip fray article) followed by one against ASUS (June 26, 2025 ip fray article).
What’s new: In a Monday (September 22, 2025) ruling, Judge Manmeet PS Arora resolved a dispute between Nokia and the three defendants regarding the production and protection of comparable license agreements between Nokia and third parties. She declined to restrict access to outside counsel or to impose a “limited-licensing restriction” on defendants’ in-house counsel (because none was imposed by the UPC’s Munich Local Division (LD) either), held that Nokia would not be able to rely upon passages it chooses to redact, and ordered the disclosure of all comparable license agreements.
Direct impact: This decision is a win for the defendants, but this is an early-stage procedural decision and highly unlikely to move the needle in near-term negotiations. The disputes are probably going to settle before Nokia will obtain (or be denied) any injunction in India.
Wider ramifications:
- This may be the first Indian decision referencing a UPC order on the same question (in-house counsel’s access to protected information).
- Nokia argued that the UPC has stricter sanctions in place for the misuse of such information. Also, it could be that Nokia will not be required to disclose as many license agreements in the UPC as in India. For example, the Mannheim LD allowed Huawei to choose which third-party license agreements to produce in a dispute with MediaTek (item 5 of our September 21, 2025 UPC Roundup).
- The net effect could be that India would always adopt the lowest common denominator for protective orders in multi-jurisdictional disputes.
Here’s the decision:
Nokia pointed to a protective order in its dispute with Lenovo about six years ago, but Judge Arora did not consider it precedential because it was a consent order. Instead, she relied on an April 5, 2024 order by the court’s coordinate bench in InterDigital v. OPPO.
Not only in the UPC but also in German regional courts, the confidentiality clubs in clude a mix of outside and in-house counsel. For the most part, the in-house lawyers granted access in India now are the same, though ASUS and Acer each replaced one of those members citing “organizational” and other reasons. That means the circle of persons with access to those documents widens as a result of the Indian order.
Nokia will still want to pursue the Indian cases. But what SEP holders see is that suing in India in addition to other jurisdictions may result in the disclosure
- of more license agreements (at least by comparison to the Mannheim LD’s stance)
- to more individuals.
Judge Arora was not swayed by the argument that sanctions are stricter in the UPC or Germany than in her court, but if other SEP holders view it the way Nokia does, they will consider it when architecting their cross-jurisdictional enforcement campaigns.
The “limited-licensing restriction” would have meant that for a period of two years, in-house counsel for defendant D with access to a license agreement between Nokia and third party T would not be allowed to participate in SEP licensing negotiations between D and T. If both D and T don’t engage in outbound licensing of SEPs, then the restriction wouldn’t have mattered in practice. But Acer and ASUS actually do license their patents to third parties (for example, Acer is suing truck maker PACCAR (July 24, 2025 ip fray article; video patents are not an issue there, but it’s an example of Acer’s outbound licensing program). And some of the third parties with which Nokia has license agreements in place may seek to license their patents to Acer, ASUS and Hisense.
Nokia can submit redacted versions of third-party agreements, but one requirement is that the redacted passages must not be pertinent to the FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) analysis. Given that FRAND is a holistic concept, one can probably always argue that a passage is relevant, and defendants’ outside counsel will have that opportunity because Nokia must also file unredacted versions and objections to redactions can then be raised.
Counsel
Nokia is being represented by Lall & Sethi‘s Sandeep Sethi, Ira Law‘s Abhilasha Nautiyal, Shuvam Bhattacharya, and Asavari Jain, as well as Vignesh Raj T, and Aviral Goy.
AsusTeK and Acer are both being represented by a team at Inttl Advocare: Hemant Singh, Mamta Rani Jha, Siddhant Sharma, Abhay Tandon, and Shreyansh Gupta.
Meanwhile, Hisense is being represented by a team at Saikrishna & Associates: Saikrishna Rajagopal, Julien George, Victor V. Tandon, Anu Paarcha, Avijit Kumar, N. Parvati, Alka Bisht, and Christo Sabu.