Dolby files 11th UPC lawsuit as codec royalty battles intensify

The lawsuit signals a hardening stance against the 'royalty-free' narrative surrounding open-source standards like Opus and AV1. By successfully litigating at the UPC, Dolby is proving that non-participating patent holders can still enforce licensing fees on technologies widely adopted by Big Tech. This creates a mandatory cost layer for hardware manufacturers who assumed these codecs were free due to promote-only initiatives by Google and Samsung. For the streaming ecosystem, this confirms that the Unified Patent Court is becoming the primary venue for multi-national patent enforcement. Watch for the final judgments in the Acer and Beko cases to see if the UPC grants broader injunctions against hardware implementers who refuse library-wide licensing terms.

The litigation against ASUS is part of a broader push by Dolby to monetize intellectual property across multiple streaming standards where it holds 'passive' rights. In March 2026, Dolby expanded this strategy to the United States and Brazil, suing Snap Inc. over its use of the AV1 and HEVC video codecs. According to reporting from Access Advance, that action was the first time a licensor from its pool asserted AV1 patents against a streaming platform. In those filings, Dolby explicitly argued it made no FRAND or royalty-free commitments for AV1 because it did not participate in the standard's development by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM).

Furthermore, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) has recently demonstrated an inclination toward patent holders in these disputes. Per ip fray (March 2026), the Düsseldorf Local Division issued a permanent injunction against Beko after finding the company failed to express a timely willingness to license Dolby's Opus-related patents. The court ruled that the Opus codec's ubiquity in smart TVs could confer a dominant market position on the patent holder, as consumers expect devices to support all common audio and video formats. This legal precedent effectively pressures hardware OEMs to settle or face sales bans across multiple European territories.

Additional enforcement activity highlights Dolby's aggressive posture in 2026. In June 2026, the company filed suit in the UPC Hamburg Division against TPV Technology terminals, a major manufacturer of Philips-branded TVs, regarding AV1 patents acquired from GE Video Compression. According to LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions (June 2025), Dolby now holds significant patent quality leads in immersive and real-time audio technologies like MPEG-H and Opus. As litigation continues, the industry is seeing a shift where even standards explicitly designed for open access are being subjected to traditional hardware-per-unit royalty models.