InterDigital announced it has obtained a preliminary injunction (PI) against Disney from the Seventh Court of the Judicial District of the State Capital of Rio de Janeiro, involving two patents related to Advanced Video Coding (AVC/H.264) and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) technologies. The announcement stated the ruling was based on an independent expert report commissioned by the court, which determined the asserted encoder claims are not subject to FRAND licensing obligations. The relevant standards define decoding (playing video data) but not encoding (creating new recorded content or converting existing recorded content).

Case number: 0811901-50.2025.8.19.0001. The patents in question are PI 0305519-1 (“Adaptive Weighting Method for Reference Images in Video Coding”) and PI 0318825-6 (“Method for Coding Picture Block Video Signal Data”). The injunction explicitly states that such encoding patent claims are not subject to standard-essential FRAND licensing obligations. The court also dismissed arguments regarding predictive coding, as this technology constitutes an optional feature that can be disabled.

The injunction requires Disney to cease encoding or distributing AVC or HEVC format video data utilizing weighted prediction tools within Brazil within five days. Violations will incur cumulative daily fines of approximately US$18,000 (equivalent to approximately RMB 130,000).

Earlier this year, InterDigital initiated multimedia patent litigation against Disney streaming services—including Disney-owned Hulu and ESPN subsidiaries—in the United States, the Unified Patent Court (UPC), Germany, and Brazil. Disney attempted to block these enforcement actions through U.S. FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) litigation. However, in May, the Mannheim Regional Division of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) issued its first Anti-Anti-Injunction Stay (AASI) against Disney, prohibiting Disney from seeking any injunction that would interfere with the enforcement of patent claims and rulings within the UPC, and requiring Disney to withdraw all related applications already filed.

Unlike most Brazilian standard essential patent injunctions based on provisional intellectual property protection principles, this injunction rests on substantive adjudication. Coincidentally, Brazil's first such preliminary patent injunction also emerged earlier this year in another video streaming case.

This marks the second explicit determination that ITU-standardized video coding formats fall outside the scope of FRAND commitments made by ITU standard contributors. Earlier this year, Administrative Law Judge Doris Johnson Hines of the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) reached the same conclusion during the investigation of Nokia v. Amazon. The High Court of England and Wales (EWHC) is also set to address this issue during and after its hearing scheduled for late next month.

In this case, a 200-page expert report addressed 68 questions posed by the court, covering both technical and FRAND licensing issues. While the expert concurred with Disney's position that InterDigital failed to demonstrate implementation of the encoding steps in Brazil, they explicitly stated this was not a prerequisite for infringement—distributing video data in the infringing format constitutes infringement. This standard applies similarly in multiple jurisdictions, including Germany.