Context: Almost three months ago, Nokia started to enforce its multimedia patents, many of which are standard-essential patents (SEPs), against Hisense, Acer and ASUS in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and Germany (April 1, 2025 ip fray article). Shortly thereafter, similar cases were discovered in Brazil and the United States International Trade Commission (USITC or ITC) (April 11, 2025 ip fray article). Two weeks ago, Nokia sued only two of the three defendants (Hisense and Acer, but not ASUS) in India as well (June 13, 2025 ip fray article). That suggested that negotiations with ASUS were looking more promising.
What’s new: Nokia has now brought patent assertions against ASUS, too. Two patents are at issue in a case before the Delhi High Court (HC). Nokia’s response to inquiries about this development points to the wider global campaign and the fact that many of ASUS’s competitors have taken a license to the patents in question.
Direct impact & wider ramifications: Typically patent holders scale up their enforcement efforts gradually, depending on how negotiations progress with a given defendant. Nokia, like other SEP holders, concludes the vast majority of its license agreements without having to resort to litigation, but when it sues, it seeks to end a dispute quickly.
These are the two video coding patents Nokia is asserting against ASUS personal computers in the Intellectual Property Division of the Delhi HC, where the cases against Hisense and Acer are already pending:
- Indian Patent No. 424507 (“Motion Prediction in Video Coding and An Apparatus”); the invention is about efficient merge candidate list construction used in inter prediction tool of HEVC.
- Indian Patent No. 338105 (āMotion Prediction in Video Codingā); the invention is about efficient bi-prediction approach used in inter prediction tool of HEVC.
This is Nokia’s statement:
“Nokia is pursuing a case against Asus in the Intellectual Property division of the High Court of Delhi as part of a wider global litigation campaign regarding the unauthorized use of our video technologies in their devices. We hope that Asus will soon agree to accept a license on fair terms, like many of their competitors have done.Ā Our door is always open for good-faith negotiations.”
While Hisense and Acer are known to have brought UK FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) cases against Nokia, no such case involving ASUS has shown up yet. It remains to be seen whether ASUS will join the other two defendants in that jurisdiction, whose SEP case law hit a new low yesterday with an interim-license declaration in Samsung v. ZTE (June 25, 2025 ip fray article).