Analysis
Later this month, the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Court of Appeal will hear Amazon’s appeal against InterDigital’s anti-interference injunction (AII) (March 25, 2026 ip fray article), which the Mannheim Local Division (LD) granted last year. Sooner or later, video patent injunctions against Amazon will come down. Amazon already experienced it in its dispute with Nokia (February 8, 2025 ip fray article). But contrary to what some completely misguided “AI” analysis1 says, there will (short of surprises such as preliminary injunctions) not be any serious settlement pressure on Amazon this year. And possibly not even in a year from now,2 for the reasons discussed further below.
Disney is likely going to be hit with a multi-country High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) injunction in less than a month (May 5, 2026 ip fray article). But Disney is already demonstrating that even three German injunctions (February 13, 2026 ip fray article) are not enough to force it to settle. Disney apparently has no qualms over alienating its customers to the extent that a leading consumer protection organization has already become involved. As discussed further below, there comes a point where the line is crossed from resilience (undoubtedly a virtue) to morally reprehensible conduct: a failure to inform actual and prospective customers that might run afoul of consumer protection laws. The latter would take the definition of the term “unwilling licensee” to a new level.
There is a stark contrast between
- how streamers can and sometimes do respond to injunctions (which suggests that the FRAND balance is not working well enough)
and - how they seek to
- subject to fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND3) licensing obligations any video patent, no matter whether it is indisputably not essential to any industry standard, and
- argue that even encoding claims are subject to a contractual FRAND obligation despite different U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) findings to the contrary (most recently by the ITC Staff in a Nokia case against Acer and ASUS: May 15, 2026 ip fray article).
Simply put, the ones who are apparently least susceptible to patent injunctions are simultaneously the ones who take the most expansive positions on what must be licensed on FRAND terms. This is almost as if researchers based in Antarctica demanded more powerful air conditioning devices than anyone could buy in Africa.
In the UK they have found courts that are willing to entertain such overreaching claims instead of throwing them out right away. The refusal to throw out such absurd claims at the earliest stage is a very serious issue in its own right (as the UPC’s Mannheim LD correctly noticed), but should any UK court actually hold that a (F)RAND licensing obligation applies to non-standards-related patents only because they are routinely licensed together with SEPs4, then the UK would have to be considered a rogue state. The UK would make itself an enemy of innovation and intellectual property. The civilized world would have to respond at the WTO level unless UK lawmakers immediately remedy the situation (after such a decision) through legislative override.
1. Disney acknowledges impact of patent injunctions, but allegedly neither informs customers nor adjusts its prices: hold-out first, customers last?
Disney shows that the combination of market power and ruthlessness complicates patent enforcement and licensing. A company like Apple has even more market power (and is no less prepared to leverage it). But for the reasons discussed further below, that’s different. Simply put, Apple can do a lot, but it can’t switch off 4G and 5G.
Earlier this year we already noticed German media reports on Disney’s deactivation of Dolby Vision, HDR10+ (which has apparently been reactivated since: February 26, 2026 Golem article), and 3D (with the Apple Vision Pro device) (January 23, 2026 ip fray article). It already appeared unusual that a company like Disney would compromise its brand reputation that way, but it was even more surprising to find out that Disney is being accused of
- not informing prospective customers of the deactivation of certain features,
- not informing current customers, and
- not offering a discount to compensate for a degradation of service quality.
That is what we read most recently on German IT news website golem.de, which referred to an ip fray article. That Golem article says:
Weder Bestandskunden noch Neukunden werden von Disney darüber informiert, dass das Abo Disney+ Premium nur mit technischen Einschränkungen angeboten wird.
Our translation:
Neither existing nor prospective customers are informed by Disney that the Disney+ Premium subscription is only offered with technical limitations.
With reference to that report, we reached out to Disney’s German press department and asked for comment specifically on the above sentence. The answer they sent us on Tuesday sidesteps the real issue:
Aufgrund eines Gerichtsverfahrens vor einem deutschen Patentgericht waren wir gezwungen, Änderungen an der Verfügbarkeit einiger Premium‑Videoformate vorzunehmen. Wir bedauern sehr, dass dies notwendig war, und teilen die Frustration unserer Kundinnen und Kunden. Wir haben so schnell wie möglich an Lösungen gearbeitet, um den Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauern das bestmögliche Erlebnis entsprechend ihrer Endgeräte und ihrem Abonnement zu bieten.
Machine translation (Google Translate):
Due to legal proceedings before a German patent court, we were forced to make changes to the availability of some premium video formats. We deeply regret that this was necessary and share the frustration of our customers. We have been working as quickly as possible on solutions to provide viewers with the best possible experience based on their devices and subscription.
What they do not say is why they do not at least reduce customers’ frustration by
- properly informing everyone of the removal of certain functionality and
- proactively offering rebates.
The latter is what the leading German consumer rights organization, Verbraucherzentrale, says customers should demand (March 23, 2026 Verbraucherzentrale article). Golem has stayed on top of this issue. It reported on January 21, March 12, March 13, and possibly other occasions.
Disney is within its rights to deactivate functionality if it believes the better choice is to wait until licensing costs go down (though there is no guarantee that they will). But its customers have rights as well. If Disney can get away with what it is doing, it may just have a captive audience because of its unique content.
What will Disney do subsequently to a multi-country UPC injunction? That takes us to the more general part: the room for maneuvering that streamers, unlike display device makers, have.
2. Streamers are chefs — display device makers are waiters
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- That one still, after four rounds, misses some key points. It actually applies traditional SEP enforcement logic to a streaming dispute instead of understanding why this is a new situation. It speaks volumes that the AI “analysis” did not factor in what one can learn from the Disney situation. ↩︎
- Note that this is about pressure points. Parties can always reach an agreement even without pressure. In fact, most SEP license agreements are concluded without litigation, thus without any near-term pressure. ↩︎
- In the context of video standards, the relevant pledges are typically RAND (not FRAND) pledges, but the omission of the word “fair” is meaningless. To the extent they allege an entitlement to a license under EU antitrust law (§ 102 TFEU), such as under Huawei v. ZTE, the correct term is FRAND at any rate. ↩︎
- This is fundamentally different from a patent-by-patent determination that a compulsory license is warranted due to patent-specific market power. ↩︎