Context: Nokia’s video patent licensing business is growing, and agreements are typically reached without litigation, but last year, Nokia brought infringement actions against Acer, ASUS, and Hisense after failed negotiations (April 1, 2025 ip fray article). The three implementers tried to gain leverage in the UK, where the usual interim-license declaration was made (December 18, 2025 ip fray article). Hisense took an actual license (January 8, 2026 ip fray article).
What’s new: Yesterday (January 22, 2026) evening, the Munich I Regional Court’s 7th Civil Chamber brought down the patent hammer on Acer (case no. 7 O 4100/25) and ASUS (7 O 4102/25). At the end of a trial, a ruling was announced from the bench, ordering Germany-wide injunctions against Acer and ASUS over EP2774375 (“Method and apparatus for video coding”).
Direct impact: Nokia typically enforces such rulings even during an appeal. The hurdle for an enforcement stay is rather high in Germany. It would not be surprising if Acer and/or ASUS settled now.
Wider ramifications: This shows that UK FRAND actions brought by implementers are not worth their high costs. Neither the Munich court nor the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Mannheim Local Division are prepared to recognize UK court-ordered licenses or attach any weight to UK declarations on licensing questions, and most likely courts in Brazil, Colombia, other German cities, and other UPC divisions are going to give those UK court rulings the same treatment.
The patented invention enables improved prediction of image areas and efficient encoding of motion vectors, resulting in a reduction of the amount of data to be transmitted without affecting image quality.
Nokia issued the following statement:
Litigation is always a last resort for Nokia. Our aim is for Acer’s and Asus’s consumers to benefit from our video technologies, but the innovation ecosystem breaks down if innovators are not fairly compensated for the use of their technologies, as it becomes harder to fund research into next generation technologies. We welcome the court’s decision and hope Acer and Asus now play by the rules and agree licenses on fair terms.
Bench rulings are a rather recent phenomenon in Munich. For a long time, the Mannheim Regional Court was the only German court to do so, and only sporadically. But the current composition of the Munich court’s 7th Civil Chamber (Presiding Judge Dr. Oliver Schoen (“Schön” in German), Judge Katalin Tözsér, and Judge Dr. Florian Schweyer) is highly productive and takes cases from filing to decision in record time. In this case, it took less than nine months.
Last year, well over 300 cases were filed with that court (January 2, 2026 ip fray article). The other patent infringement panel, the 21st Civil Chamber, will soon be chaired by Judge Dr. Hubertus Schacht (January 16, 2026 ip fray article), an announcement that has drawn enthusiastic reactions from the German patent litigation community.
The Munich court is even prepared to grant preliminary injunctions over standard-essential patents (November 20, 2025 ip fray article).
Counsel for Nokia
Bird & Bird’s Christian Harmsen (lead), Dr. Tobias Wilcke, Dr. Joerg Witting (“Jörg” in German), and Tamy Tietze; and Cohausz & Florack patent attorneys Dr. Christoph Walke and Lars Grannemann. In-house: Dr. Clemens Heusch and Armin Schwitulla.