ASUS says FRAND but wants $99B for SEP license, approximately $20B attributable to Nokia: UK interim license hearing kicks off

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Context: Acer, ASUS and Hisense got sued by Nokia over video patents in  in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) (April 1, 2025 ip fray article), Germany, the United States (April 11, 2025 ip fray article), Brazil and India (June 13, 2025 ip fray article). The centerpiece of the three companies’ defensive strategies is the pursuit of an interim-license declaration in the High Court of Justice for England & Wales (EWHC). which has already given rise to an appeal over a procedural matter relating to FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) disclosures (September 10, 2025 ip fray article).

What’s new: This afternoon, an EWHC hearing that will last until Friday has kicked off. Mr Justice Mellor will hear Nokia’s jurisdictional challenge in the first half of the hearing, and the three claimants’ request for interim-license declarations in the second. According to Nokia’s skeleton argument, the three companies could be licensed anytime if they agreed to enter into binding arbitration. The most noteworthy revelation is not entirely new (because it came up in a U.S. court hearing that went unnoticed): ASUS, which is suing Nokia partly through an affiliate entity, is seeking $99 billion from U.S. carriers for the alleged use of its patents, of which amount approximately 20% would be attributable to (and presumably subject to indemnification by) Nokia. That would roughly amount to Nokia’s entire market capitalization.

Direct impact:

Given the extreme positions Mr Justice Mellor took on Samsung’s request for an interim license from ZTE (ZTE actually offered an interim license, subject to a FRAND determination in the very jurisdiction Samsung described as the best choice in its dispute with Ericsson: June 25, 2025 ip fray article), it will be hard for Nokia to prevail on its jurisdictional challenge or avoid an interim-license declaration.

However, this case raises a new issue because Nokia offered an “arbitration-adjustable” license agreement. The three implementers could be licensed immediately, provided that they enter into binding arbitration. This ups the ante for the claimants in the event of an appeal, given that Lord Justice Arnold considers arbitration the most suitable form of FRAND dispute resolution.

ASUSTeK’s own royalty demands, even if merely a litigation position, are not merely exorbitant: they are an insult to human intelligence. It is surprising that Nokia waited so long to file its own lawsuits, but that may be reflective of Nokia not taking those royalty demands seriously in the slightest. Any neutral observer or decision-maker would have to doubt ASUS’s commitment to FRAND, also in light of its dispute with Xiaomi: Xiaomi is seeking an interim license from ASUS (September 9, 2025 ip fray article). Normally, a company seeking such a license for itself would grant one to third parties without hesitation.
Wider ramifications: Cross-border SEP rulings of different kinds are currently proliferating and escalating. Mr Justice Meade, who is more diplomatic than Mr Justice Mellor but no less prepared to go to extreme lengths to defend the UK judiciary’s vision of being the global FRAND forum, has granted Amazon an anti-antisuit injunction (AASI) that is actually a combination of an AAASI and AAAAASI (October 20, 2025 ip fray article). Samsung has withdrawn a complaint it filed with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) against ZTE (October 16, 2025 ip fray article) further to an injunction by the Munich I Regional Court, which wil hear a ZTE v. Samsung infringement case on Thursday (October 23, 2025 ip fray article). The EWHC is generally inclined now to expedite any FRAND trial regardless of the complexity of the issues and the need for extensive document production and expert analysis.

A little over a year ago, Xiaomi won the first-ever UK interim-license declaration in a SEP case (October 3, 2024 ip fray article). But in that case, Panasonic, too, had chosen to litigate FRAND in the UK. The dispute arose only from Panasonic trying to backtrack from the position it originally took.

In a dispute between Lenovo and Ericsson, the EWHC was unconvinced, and the main problem was that only one of the parties (Lenovo) elected the UK as the FRAND forum. The England & Wales Court of Appeal (EWCA) sided with Lenovo, opening the floodgates, and no Supreme Court review (which Ericsson was seeking: March 31, 2025 ip fray article) took place because the parties settled prior to any decision on Ericsson’s petition.

Amazon stretched the envelope with a request for an interim license involving non-SEPs in addition to SEPs (February 11, 2025 ip fray article). Nokia was asserting only non-SEPs in the UK, which didn’t appear to matter much to Lord Justice Arnold. His ruling was purely on jurisdiction, yet blurred the distinction between SEPs and non-SEPs in scenarios in which different types of patents are enforced. By the “logic” of SEPs and non-SEPs typically being licensed together, the UK judiciary could also start to force SEP holders to enter into all sorts of wide-ranging commercial agreements if they did so in the past. For example, Nokia and Apple settled a dispute in 2017, and there were different commercial components to it. The last renewal happened without litigation, and it is not known what non-SEP-licensing elements the deal has. But theoretically the UK courts, based on what Lord Justice Arnold wrote, could then also force Nokia to sell certain infrastructure equipment to Apple, at prices determined by the English courts.

In the video streaming context, encoding claims are (according to findings by the ITC) not subject to the ITU FRAND pledge. Only decoding claims are. That is another reason for which the UK courts should be more careful about whether they have jurisdiction over global FRAND determinations no matter the parties, no matter the standard.

The latest development is now that parties which actually could be licensed with a single stroke of a pen ask the UK judiciary to intervene because they do not like the parameters. Samsung itself once preferred China for that purpose, but later told ZTE that China was unacceptable and only the UK should decide. That was outrageous, and the appeal will be heard next week (October 16, 2025 ip fray article). Now there are Acer, ASUS (unashamed of its own supra-FRAND demands) and Hisense, and they just don’t want to arbitrate or at least not on the basis Nokia proposes (Hisense apparently made an arbitration counterproposal that Nokia considers unreasonable).

Implications of UPC and Munich stance on interim licenses

At this point it appears that Nokia wants to see how the UK courts (first the EWHC, then potentially the EWCA) will deal with this new situation in which three parties want a UK FRAND determination instead of arbitration.

Theoretically, Nokia could still anti-antisuit relief in the UPC and the Munich I Regional Court. For the current state of affairs, it would be too late to seek a preliminary injunction. But once there are new developments, Nokia could do so. For example, the actual grant of an interim license might constitute a new situation over the mere pendency of a motion. Nokia could argue that it did not actually expect Acer, ASUS and Hisense to prevail, given that Nokia is prepared to license them (provided that the three implementers enter into binding arbitration).

That could trigger an anti-anti-interim-license injunction like the one we reported on yesterday in Amazon v. InterDigital. The problem with the current escalation of cross-jurisdictional turf wars is that it may at some point come down to which jurisdiction can impose more draconian sanctions. The idea of combined AASIs/AAAASIs as a defensive measure works only if someone doesn’t think that obtaining an AAASI (and Amazon’s injunction is effectively an AAASI, provided that one consider an interim license, at least in certain circumstances, an ASI) is too risky because of the sanctions resulting from enforcement of the AAAASI.

A company like Amazon may play hardball and just see what the UPC and the Munich I Regional Court really do, betting on UK judges exercising their discretion, which goes quite far especially with respect to remedies and contempt-of-court penalties. Then, however, the UPC and especially the Munich I Regional Court could easily win the sanctions match if they were prepared to grant ex parte patent infringement PIs, treating certain maneuvers in the UK as a fundamental threat to the enforeceability of the intellectual property rights concerned, declaring the implementers unwilling and entering injunctions provided that there is a plausible argument for infringement and validity.