Delhi High Court Clarifies that Burden of Proving FRAND Lies with the Patentee in Philips v. Bansal Patent Infringement Case

On May 18, 2026, the Delhi High Court in India issued an appellate judgment in the patent infringement case of Philips v. Indian DVD manufacturers K.K. Bansal and Rajesh Bansal, setting aside the 2018 trial court ruling in favor of Philips and dismissing all of Philips’ claims.

The Indian patent in suit, IN184753, relates to a decoding device “for converting a modulated signal into a sequence of M-bit information words” and expired on February 12, 2015. Accordingly, the scope of the proceedings was limited to damages. On July 12, 2018, the trial court held that the patent in suit constituted a Standard Essential Patent (SEP) and ordered the Bansal parties to pay royalties to Philips, while also imposing punitive damages of 500,000 Indian rupees against Rajesh Bansal.

On appeal, the Bansal parties argued that the chips and PCB boards used in their manufactured and sold DVD players had been lawfully procured through authorized channels from Sony, SANYO, MediaTek, and other companies. The Bansal parties pointed out that MediaTek is a registered supplier of Philips, and that they had purchased the aforementioned components from authorized distributors of MediaTek. Therefore, even if the relevant technical solutions were implemented, the doctrine of international patent exhaustion should apply, and Philips had no right to continue asserting infringement claims against downstream DVD player manufacturers.

The court accepted the Bansal parties’ defense, holding that even if Philips could establish that the DVD SEP was valid and infringed, because the claimed invention was primarily implemented at the chip/PCB component level and the Bansal parties had procured those components from authorized distributors of MediaTek, Philips’ patent rights were exhausted upon the placement on the market of chips incorporating the patented invention.

Furthermore, the appellate court found that the patent in suit did not constitute an SEP, because Philips had failed to submit claim charts demonstrating that its Indian patent was essential to the standard. The declaration of essentiality submitted by Philips lacked a mapping analysis between the claims of the Indian patent and the DVD Forum standard, and the person who issued the declaration did not appear in court nor file an affidavit, thus rendering the declaration devoid of probative value.

A particularly notable aspect of this case is that the Delhi High Court established the burden of proof rules for FRAND disputes in domestic SEP infringement cases.

The court pointed out that the starting point for reviewing a FRAND dispute is the royalty offer made by the patentee itself; one cannot skip the offer and directly assess the willingness of the implementer. An SEP patentee must first prove that it has made a FRAND offer, thereby establishing itself as a “willing licensor”; only then does the inquiry shift to whether the implementer constitutes an “unwilling licensee.” The court required that an SEP patentee must not only prove the existence of the patent but also complete multiple levels of proof, including the existence of the standard, the correspondence between the patent in suit and the standard, the relationship between the accused product and the standard, and the reasonableness of the FRAND licensing terms.

This judgment imposes higher evidentiary burdens on SEP patentees while also providing implementers with stronger defenses. The China Intellectual Property Lawyers Network will continue to follow further developments in this case.