As I noted on Friday, following reports elsewhere, the Mannheim Local Division of the Unified Patent Court and the Munich Regional Court both have entered orders forbidding Amazon from pursuing a declaration of entitlement to an interim FRAND license from the High Court of England and Wales. The cases are InterDigital VC Holdings, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., UPC_CFI_936/2025 (L.D. Mannheim Sept. 30, 2025), and InterDigital VC Holdings, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., Judgment of the Munich Regional Court, Case No. 21 O 12112/25 (Sept. 26, 2025, as amended). The decisions are available, with redactions, in the original German and in English translation on ip fray. Both were entered ex parte—in other words, they are ex parte preliminary injunctions. The UPC decision provides the more extended analysis, concluding that jurisdiction over the matter is proper even though InterDigital has not yet initiated a patent infringement action in the UPC, and that InterDigital has satisfied the requirements for a preliminary injunction, namely a risk of imminent infringement (Erstbegehungsgefahr), in the sense of imminent undermining of InterDigital’s ability to enforce its property rights; urgency; and the balance of harms.
The context in which these actions are being litigated, for readers who are not familiar with the subject matter, is the evolving practice of the English courts of granting declarations that the owner of a portfolio of FRAND-committed SEPs is obligated to enter into an interim license of those SEPs, pending the final resolution of its dispute with the implementer over terms. The first such decision, Panasonic Holdings Corp. v. Xiaomi Tech. UK Ltd., [2024] EWCA Civ 1143, was handed down just over a year ago. As the UPC panel notes, in that case Panasonic had previously agreed that the English court would establish the terms of a global FRAND license, only to subsequently initiate actions in Germany that would seem to undermine that commitment. Rather than enter an antisuit injunction (ASI), however, the Court of Appeal for England and Wales concluded that a willing licensor in the position of Panasonic “would agree to enter into, and would enter into, an interim licence of” Panasonic’s portfolio “pending the determination by the Patents Court of the FRAND terms of the final licence,” and that a declaration to this effect “would serve a useful purpose in forcing Panasonic to reconsider its position.” In two subsequent decisions, however, the English courts have entered similar declarations despite the absence of any agreement on the part of the SEP owner that the English courts would determine the terms of a global license. (For previous discussion on this blog, see here, here, and here).
Anyway, these two recent decisions from the UPC and the Munich court may put an end to the English practice. The UPC decision in particular emphasizes that the effect of a declaration for an interim license is intended to, and likely would, deprive the SEP owner of its ability to litigate claims for patent infringement in other courts that are properly seised of infringement actions pending before them. (If the SEP owner agrees to an interim license, then the existence of the license puts an end to any claim for injunctive relief elsewhere; if the owner refuses, it then becomes, at least in the eyes of the English courts, an unwilling licensor, which could have negative consequences. And, at least in the present case, assuming that Swiss law governs the terms of InterDigital’s FRAND commitment to the ITU, Amazon might be entitled to specific performance of any obligation to enter into an interim license.) In this sense, then, the interim license, even if less formally coercive than an ASI, is nevertheless likely to coerce the affected party to abandon litigation in other forums.
The decisions of these two courts, while dramatic, is not altogether surprising, given the similar effect of an interim license to an ASI, and the willingness of the continental courts to enter anti-antisuit injunctions (AASIs) in similar circumstances. Although it remains an open question whether these courts would reach the same result in a case with facts similar to Panasonic v. Xiaomi, I would guess there may not be other cases like that one anytime soon; SEP owners, I suspect, will be quite reluctant to agree to having the English courts make global FRAND determinations—quite a reversal of what most people thought would be the case after Unwired Planet v. Huawei, when the English courts were perceived as being more favorable to SEP owners.
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