Nokia upgrades Hisense, Acer disputes with Indian patent infringement filings

Context: In the spring, Nokia determined that licensing discussions with Hisense, Acer and ASUSTeK were not going anywhere, and filed patent infringement lawsuits against the three companies in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) (April 1, 2025 ip fray article), Germany, the United States (April 11, 2025 ip fray article) and Brazil. This week an Acer v. Nokia FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) case surfaced in the High Court of Justice for England & Wales (EWHC) (June 12, 2025 LinkedIn post by ip fray; at the time of that article we weren’t sure but we have since learned that there are no patent infringement claims in that case). The patents Nokia is asserting in those cases relate to video coding.

What’s new: Today Nokia provided a statement according to which the company “is pursuing a case against Hisense and Acer in the Intellectual Property division of the High Court of Delhi [Delhi HC] as part of a wider global litigation campaign regarding the unauthorized use of our technologies in their devices. We hope that both Acer and Hisense will soon agree to accept a license on fair terms, like many of their competitors have done. Our door is always open for good-faith negotiations.”

Direct impact: While patent litigation in India is notoriously slow, it is a large market for those companies, meaning that time is not on the defendants’ side. In the end there could be injunctions against Acer PCs and/or Hisense smart TVs in India, and substantial damages.

Wider ramifications: We can only speculate as to why Nokia is bringing those claims against Hisense and Acer, but not against the third defendant in the same series, ASUS. There actually is an Indian online store that ASUS operates (ASUS India). One plausible explanation would be that settlement negotiations between Nokia and ASUS are progressing more satisfactorily than with the other two companies, with which Nokia’s negotiations apparently began a long time ago but have yet to bear fruit.

These are the patents-in-suit in the newly-filed cases in the Delhi HC:

Patent No. 424507 (IN’507); Titled “Motion Prediction in Video Coding and An Apparatus”: The invention is about efficient merge candidate list construction used in an inter-prediction tool of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard.

Patent No. 338105 (IN’105); Titled “Motion Prediction in Video Coding”: The invention is about an efficient bi-prediction approach used in an inter-prediction tool of HEVC.