InterDigital’s Josh Schmidt has been at the helm of the company’s legal division for over five years. Throughout that time, he has overseen some of its biggest patent litigation cases and helped navigate the company to successful settlements.
In an exclusive interview with ip fray this week, he discussed InterDigital’s global patent infringement case against Disney, his views on the diverging approaches of different courts and their impact on standard-essential patent (SEP) litigation, the role of antitrust in SEP fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) disputes, and using arbitration versus mediation as alternative dispute resolution mechanisms.
Josh Schmidt has been at InterDigital for nearly 12 years, working his way up from Assistant General Counsel (in March 2015) to his current position of Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary. Prior to joining InterDigital, he was an associate at Dechert for over five years. He is also currently a member of the Philadelphia Youth Network Board of Directors, where he chairs the Finance and Audit Committee.
Mr. Schmidt just passed his five-year anniversary mark as Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of InterDigital. He reveals three of his biggest highlights from that time:
- The team he has helped build: the success the company has had starts with a “world-class” team of engineers who are responsible for developing the next generation of technologies. That continues with the patent team he oversees, responsible for protecting that innovation, and ends with a licensing team, with which his team works really closely and which has gotten most of InterDigital’s deals done bilaterally. For those handful of transactions that do require some litigation, he is proud of the litigation team he has helped build from the team of two it started with.
- Maintaining a mantra of process improvement: One through line he has seen in successful companies across the course of his career is that they routinely engage in continuous improvement rather than being satisfied with their current station. Originally a mantra, it is now happening “organically” throughout the company.
- Overcoming key challenges: While the company has had difficult periods, it is the perseverance that has been a highlight for Mr. Schmidt, including when both licensing agreements with Apple and Samsung were expiring in 2022. At that point, they were a huge portion of the company’s overall revenue. Getting through that period really helped establish the platform from which the company has since built.
Disney
Mr. Schmidt’s tenure has seen the company win eight injunctions (out of eight patent cases decided to date) against Disney, since the company first launched an enforcement campaign in February 2025 across courts in the U.S., Germany, the UPC, and Brazil (February 3, 2025 ip fray article).
As well as being granted three by the Munich I Regional Court (November 21, 2025 ip fray article and February 13, 2026 ip fray article), it was granted three by the UPC (June 16, 2026 ip fray article and July 23, 2026 ip fray article and September 2, 2026 ip fray article), and two by a court in Brazil (September 11, 2025 ip fray article).
Mr. Schmidt also emphasizes that Disney has been branded as an “unwilling licensee” by the UPC (June 16, 2026 ip fray article), and decided to disable its HEVC function on its streaming services (July 28, 2026 ip fray article), in favor of its VP9, “which is inferior, not as widely supported, or as efficient”, he adds. The company has since sued Disney (August 24, 2026 ip fray article) for an injunction regarding the use of a VP9 patent which has already been found valid, and a hearing is scheduled for that case in mid-December. The remaining court cases will be heard next year.
Because it disabled some of its features, Disney has now come under heat from various consumer groups, some of which have threatened class-action lawsuits (September 25, 2026 ip fray article and October 16, 2026 ip fray article).
“How Disney treats its customers is largely its own decision; we’re focused on achieving a fair royalty for our technologies,” Mr. Schmidt says. “But some of the (limited) comments it has made to the press are surprising, including that ‘they can’t pay a royalty to us because it could lead to higher costs to consumers.’” Shortly after making those comments, Disney raised prices this past month (September 23, 2026 Bloomberg article), all the while “providing an inferior service” due to the disabled functionality, he says.
Last week, 10 streaming industry associations from around the world, including the Motion Picture Association (MPA), penned an open letter to government bodies alleging “abuse” by SEP holders enforcing patents against their streamers and broadcasters (November 3, 2026 ip fray article).
But the issue is, Mr. Schmidt says, that streaming companies are starting from the position that they “should be paying nothing for using our technology… and this is a fairly astonishing proposition, since without this technology they wouldn’t exist and we’d still all be getting DVDs through the mail”.
Part of the reason there is so much litigation in this space at the moment is that negotiating with a company that thinks it should be paying zero is “fundamentally” difficult, he adds.
Antitrust has a ‘limited role’ in SEP FRAND
Last month, InterDigital released its Q3 2026 financial results, within which it announced an array of deals and dispute updates, including that TCL has filed an antitrust complaint against InterDigital with the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC). This is not a new type of move, Mr. Schmidt notes; some implementers have long used antitrust claims “as part of their playbook”.
To that point, any time the company is thinking about bringing litigation, one consideration that is always made is the likelihood that it will face antitrust claims from the counterparty. But Mr. Schmidt believes that antitrust should have a limited role in SEP FRAND disputes:
While InterDigital has confidence its licensing practices comply with applicable antitrust law and its commitments to SDOs, most cases, he says, are at their core “contractual” disputes related to the appropriate economics, which should remain between the parties. This is one area that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has supported InterDigital, as shown in its statement of interest filed last year, in which it noted that the United States District Court for the District of Delaware should not necessarily deem InterDigital to have market power as a result of its patent ownership position and that royalty demands do not, by themselves, harm the competitive process or constitute exclusionary conduct (October 7, 2025 ip fray article).
Global rate-setting
Judge Victor Torres, a Judge at the Rio de Janeiro State Court in Brazil, recently noted that the global SEP litigation landscape is “not working” because every jurisdiction “wants to be important” (June 24, 2026 ip fray article). Mr. Schmidt believes that judicial sovereignty is really important and that judges should be free to decide matters concerning property rights in their territory, without interference from other courts.
InterDigital’s Chief Legal Officer does not believe one approach to deciding SEP disputes should be favored over the other, but he says the company does “welcome sophisticated analysis”, and there are commonalities or shared threads among the courts that are being tasked with these disputes. He disagrees with the notion that courts outside of the U.K., namely in Europe and Brazil, are places where patent holders can go to get “automatic injunctions”, highlighting the sophisticated analysis these courts are doing to evaluate whether FRAND obligations have been satisfied.
Mr. Schmidt emphasizes he disagrees with a notion that has recently emerged suggesting rate-setting is a “simple” mathematical exercise that can be done expeditiously, noting that is “far from the truth”:
“Rate determinations are incredibly hard; they are expensive, they are time-consuming, and they often hinge on difficult assumptions where subjective choices on those assumptions can lead to wildly different outcomes. The level of precision that some of these courts are approaching on this topic, and the confidence that they have in that level of precision, is frankly at odds with the difficulties associated with it, and is evidenced by the wildly varying outcomes we’ve seen so far.”
Arbitration v. mediation
InterDigital has recently relied on arbitration as an alternative dispute resolution mechanism in some of its major patent litigation cases, including with Samsung (July 30, 2025 ip fray article), Amazon (June 12, 2026 ip fray article), Dell, and Lenovo (October 29, 2026 ip fray article).
The company views this mechanism as being “uniquely well-suited” for these types of disputes, as they typically boil down to the appropriate royalty for a license.
“The beauty of arbitration is that it’s highly customizable (the parties can customize their dispute to resolve disagreements over licensing terms, not just amounts), it’s neutral, you can have as many arbitrators with whatever qualifications as the parties agree, and you can establish an agreed process on information sharing or discovery,” Mr. Schmidt says.
One of the biggest advantages is walking away with a binding, enforceable agreement, without multiple levels of appeal that will “drag on” for multiple years after, he adds.
And while the company has made the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) pledge to SMEs selling and manufacturing IoT devices that it will use mediation to resolve impasses in SEP licensing negotiations (WIPO Mediation Pledge webpage), the Chief Legal Officer recognizes that some bad actors can use mediation to appear “reasonable” to a fact-finder, or the general public, where their goal is to “drag out” negotiations:
“Our experience thus far in mediation is that while it can bring the parties closer together, it very often doesn’t lead to a resolution at the end of it.”