Context: In April, ASUSTek (known as ASUS) and Innovative Sonic Corporation (ISC), represented by licensing agent Celerity IP, sued OPPO and its upmarket OnePlus affiliate in the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) over the alleged infringement of wireless patents (April 4, 2025 ip fray article). ASUS and Celerity IP filed a parallel suit in the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC’s) Munich Local Division (LD) over the alleged infringement of EP3346616 (“Method and apparatus for beam management in a wireless communication system”) (June 17, 2025 LinkedIn post by ip fray).
What’s new: OPPO has filed a counterclaim against ASUS in the Shanghai IP Court, asserting several of its Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard-essential patents (SEPs).
Direct impact: ASUS had also sued Xiaomi in the same venues over the same patents involved in its campaign against OPPO (February 6, 2025 ip fray article), which the parties then settled last month (November 12, 2025 ip fray article). OPPO has notably not chosen to settle, indicating its confidence in its VVC SEP portfolio to help leverage a better licensing rate. The company’s VVC SEP portfolio ranks number 14 worldwide, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology’s (CAICT’s) latest video codec SEP report (November 2025 CAICT video codec SEP report):
Wider ramifications: This is the first publicly known VVC SEP infringement case in the world, and comes against a background of an increasingly more active VVC market. Access Advance acquired the administrator of rival Via Licensing Alliance’s HEVC and VVC programs earlier this week (December 15, 2025 ip fray article), in hopes it will solve the market’s fragmentation concerns. But there is no known litigation involving VVC SEPs at the moment – unlike in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) space. Several Access Advance licensors, such as Dolby and Sun Patent Trust, recently enforced HEVC SEPs against Roku in the U.S. (July 22, 2025 ip fray article), Brazil (October 15, 2025 ip fray article), and Germany (where Dolby won Western Europe’s first-ever preliminary injunction based on an SEP: November 20, 2025 ip fray article).
One of the patents enforced in OPPO’s case is:
- CN202110412164 (“Method for determining predicted value, encoder, decoder, and computer storage medium”)
The remaining SEPs remain unknown for now.
Panel and counsel in the related UPC case
Panel: Presiding Judge Dr. Matthias Zigann, Judge Tobias Pichlmaier, and Judge Petri Rinkinen (Helsinki, Finland).
ASUS is being represented by EIP’s Dr. Christof Höhne, Isabelle Schaller, Dr. Sebastian Fuchs, Dimitri Kosenko, Maximilian Häger, Jerome Spaargaren, James Seymour, Neil Condon, Darren Smyth, and Joanne Welch, as well as ARNOLD RUESS’s Dr. Marina Wehler and Dr. Arno Risse (“Riße” in German).
Meanwhile, OPPO is being represented by Taylor Wessing’s Dr. Gisbert Hohagen.