Nokia keeps Brazilian AVC injunction alive against ASUS
The Rio de Janeiro Appellate Court upheld Nokia's preliminary injunction against ASUS concerning a standard-essential patent (SEP) related to AVC/H.264 video coding. The court rejected ASUS's claims that Nokia's licensing terms were not fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) and dismissed part of an expert report arguing the patent was non-essential. This decision has implications for Nokia's parallel case against Acer.
Key Takeaways
- The 10th Private Law Chamber of the Rio de Janeiro Appellate Court upheld Nokia’s preliminary injunction against ASUS.
- The court was unconvinced by ASUS’s claim that Nokia’s licensing terms were not fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory.
- The court threw out the part of an expert report arguing Nokia’s patent PI 0304565-0 was non-essential and therefore not infringed.
- The patent covers a skip mode method in video coding and is described as standard-essential for AVC/H.264 decoding.
- The same expert was assigned to Nokia’s parallel case against Acer, which could face a similar evidentiary record.
Why It Matters
For now, Nokia keeps the Brazilian injunction in force, and ASUS still faces a court that accepted Nokia’s FRAND position and declined to rely on the non-essentiality argument. That matters beyond this one dispute because the court said the same views likely apply to Acer, and the expert removed from the ASUS case was also working on the Acer matter. The immediate watch item is whether Acer gets a technically different record or a stronger FRAND defense than ASUS; otherwise, the two Brazilian cases may continue to track each other.
Read full article at ipfray.com