Context:
- InterDigital has hundreds of licensees. Most new agreements and renewals are reached without litigation, such as with Xiaomi (January 7, 2026 ip fray article).
- In some cases, however, InterDigital concludes that parties won’t come to the negotiating table or accept reasonable offers short of infringement lawsuits. Enforcement actions by InterDigital are presently targeting the following companies:
- Disney (January 23, 2026 ip fray article),
- Transsion (October 31, 2025 ip fray article), and
- Amazon (February 6, 2026 ip fray article).
What’s new: Today, InterDigital has announced the enforcement of patents, primarily from its joint licensing program with Sony, against Hisense and TCL the Unified Patent Court (UPC), Germany, Brazil, and India. Beyond the announcement, we’ve found a U.S. complaint by InterDigital against TCL.
Direct impact: InterDigital’s decision to sue in four major jurisdictions in parallel is a strong statement and increases the likelihood of injunctions coming down in 6-10 months.
Wider ramifications: Hisense and TCL are among the most frequently sued companies in the industry, though Hisense has recently settled a couple of disputes (with Nokia: January 8, 2026 ip fray article; with Access Advance licensors, but a Brazilian court nevertheless imposed sanctions on Hisense for litigation misconduct: February 6, 2026 ip fray article).
The specific venues are:
- the UPC’s Munich Local Division (LD), which is the most popular division of the UPC’s Court of First Instance, but aching under (and slowed down by) its enormous case load;
- the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court), which is the world’s pre-eminent SEP injunction venue (February 10, 2026 ip fray article);
- the Rio de Janeiro State Court (which just sanctioned Hisense as mentioned above)
- the Delhi High Court (HC); and
To Read The Full Story
Continue reading your article with a Membership
According to InterDigital’s press release, the patents-in-suit relate to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265), VP9 and AV1 video compression, and high dynamic range (HDR) technologies. InterDigital definitely didn’t participate in VP9 and AV1 standard-setting, so there are no FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) pledges in place with respect to those standards, which are advertised as “royalty-free” but draw enforcement actions all the time.
InterDigital’s Chief Legal Officer, Josh Schmidt, provided the following quote via the company’s press release:
“Hisense and TCL are both top-five global TV manufacturers and have built their businesses on the back of research carried out by InterDigital engineers. Our decades of investment in foundational research have helped change how we watch our favorite movies and shows, and Hisense and TCL cannot be allowed to continue to infringe our IP, particularly while many of their competitors have taken a license.”
Patents-in-suit
These are the U.S. patents-in-suit:
- United States Patent No. 8,085,846 (“Method and apparatus for decoding hybrid intra-inter coded blocks”)
- United States Patent No. 9,294,784 (“Method and apparatus for region-based filter parameter selection for de-artifact filtering”)
- United States Patent No. 10,250,877 (“Method and device for coding an image block, corresponding decoding method and decoding device”)
- United States Patent No. 11,695,962 (same as the previous (‘877) patent)
- United States Patent No. 11,399,168 (“Method for encoding and method for decoding a color transform and corresponding devices”)
- United States Patent No. 9,654,751 (“Method, apparatus and system for providing color grading for displays”)
We will try to obtain further information and may update this article. At some point we will follow up in the form of a new article.
Counsel
Brazil
Licks Attorneys (ip fray firm profile with numerous SEP achievements): Rodolfo Barreto, Bruno Falque, Amanda Terra, and Élcio de Lacerda.
India
Anand & Anand’s Pravin Anand and Vaishali Mittal.
Unified Patent Court & Germany
Like in InterDigital v. Transsion, but unlike in the Amazon and Disney disputes, Bardehle Pagenberg’s (ip fray firm profile with numerous achievements) Prof. Tilman Mueller-Stoy (“Müller-Stoy” in German) and Dr. Tilman Mueller (“Müller”). It is not a typo that they have overlapping names. The former is based in Munich (“Tilman South”) and the busiest UPC litigator as we speak; the latter is based in Hamburg (“Tilman North”). The South-North complement is how people sometimes refer to them to avoid confusion, comparable to the distinction in Germany between ALDI Süd (which runs the U.S. ALDI shops) and ALDI Nord (which owns Trader Joe’s). We are not aware of an official term for the rare occurrences on which they team up on the same case, but Tilman2 (chemical notation) might work.
Bardehle Pagenberg is collaborating with a team of patent attorneys from df-mp (ip fray firm profile with numerous achievements) led by Dr. Dominik Ho.
United States
Alston & Bird’s M. Scott Stevens, Stephen R. Lareau, Philip C. Ducker, Michelle A. Clark, Philip Hawkyard, Andrew Ligotti, Lindsay C. Church; and the Dacus Firm’s Deron R. Dacus.