Context: Earlier this year, the Munich I Regional Court entered injunctions against computer makers Acer and ASUS over a video patent asserted by Nokia (January 23, 2026 ip fray article). The public redacted version of the decision was published by the court (February 3, 2026 ip fray article). The court seized the opportunity to provide important clarifications on standard-essential patent (SEP) injunctions and the FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) defense.
What’s new: Today, the Munich I Regional Court held a combined Nokia v. Acer & ASUS trial over EP2375749 (“System and method for efficient scalable stream adaptation”), a patent that reads on the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, H.265) standard. Later, it handed down its decision, ordering injunctions against Acer and ASUS over this patent.
Direct impact:
- After the January injunction, Acer and ASUS took certain measures to keep clear of contempt of court and appear determined to reject Nokia’s licensing offers for now (February 15, 2026 ip fray article). In particular, they do not sell certain products on their German websites. Therefore, there likely is no immediate market impact and no increased chance of a settlement.
- But an additional injunction over the same standard makes it considerably harder to resume sales. It is statistically far harder to get two injunctions lifted than one.
- This patent will expire in October 2026, more than six years prior to the expiration of the patent underlying the first Munich injunctions against the same companies.
Wider ramifications:
- Nokia won an injunction over this patent against Amazon (September 20, 2024 ip fray article), and HP settled before a trial over this one (October 30, 2024 ip fray article).
- The cases will celebrate their first birthday in less than a week. With hearings and decisions coming up in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and United States International Trade Commission (USITC or ITC), some logical settlement points will be reached in a matter of months. Others would already have settled after the January injunctions in Munich.
- Hisense was sued at the same time as Acer and ASUS, and has meanwhile settled (January 8, 2026 ip fray article).
Today’s trial had been scheduled for only two hours, which is short for a case involving a FRAND defense unless it is (as here) part of a dispute in connection with which the court has already made certain determinations.
Yesterday’s win for ZTE against Samsung remains the only case in the history of all Munich-based courts where a defendant prevailed on a FRAND defense.
Court and counsel
7th Civil Chamber: Presiding Judge Dr. Oliver Schoen (“Schön”), Judge Katalin TözsĂ©r, and Judge Dr. Florian Schweyer.
Counsel for Nokia: Bird & Bird’s Christian Harmsen (lead), Nick Pearson, Dr. Joerg Witting (“Jörg”), and Tamy Tietze; and Cohausz & Florack patent attorneys Dr. Christoph Walke and Dr. Fabian Vogelbruch. In-house: Dr. Clemens Heusch.