Context: In December, ip fray discovered that both Sharp and Huawei are suing Disney in the Munich I Regional Court over HEVC-related patents (December 19, 2025 ip fray article). Both companies are Avanci Video licensors.
What’s new: Huawei also filed a suit against Disney for infringing one of its HEVC patents in the Unified Patent Court’s Mannheim Local Division in January, the UPC’s records now reveal. The patent-in-suit is EP3211897 (“Method and apparatus for encoding and decoding transform coefficients”).
Direct impact and wider ramifications: The suit marks Huawei’s fourth HEVC-related patent infringement case at the UPC. Some of its previous cases include actions against Roku and Transsion as part of collective Access Advance disputes, which resulted in both licensees taking a license to Advance’s HEVC pool (Roku: July 28, 2025 ip fray article and Transsion: December 1, 2025 ip fray article).
Disney has already been sued two separate times at the Unified Patent Court (UPC), including by Adeia in the Hague Local Division (LD: November 22, 2024 ip fray article) and InterDigital in the Mannheim LD.
While it successfully settled with Adeia in December (December 22, 2025 ip fray article), it was hit with injunctions in its case against InterDigital in parallel actions in Germany and Brazil (February 13, 2026 ip fray article), forcing Disney to remove Dolby Vision and HDR10+ features for Disney+ subscribers across Europe (January 23, 2026 ip fray article).
Court and counsel
Panel: Presiding Judge Prof. Peter Tochtermann,Judge Dirk Boettcher (“Böttcher”), and Judge Peter Agergaard (Copenhagen, Denmark).
Huawei is being represented by Arnold Ruess’s (ip fray firm profile with numerous UPC and SEP achievements) Dr. Bernhard Arnold and Dr. Julius Winkler. This case is also the first time that Arnold Ruess is counsel of record for Huawei.