Earlier today, we expanded our litigation against Disney in Europe’s Unified Patent Court over Disney’s ongoing infringement of our innovation related to VP9 encoding technology. This is important because in our dispute, Disney has used VP9 to support 4K video content as a possible workaround to its ongoing infringement of our technology. Our position is clear; any use of VP9 continues to infringe our patented innovation, and Disney cannot use it to avoid paying us fair royalties while also delivering an inferior experience to its customers.
Before I expand further on VP9, I want to set out where things stand, because the record reflects a clear pattern: first, that Disney is an unwilling licensee; and, second, that instead of paying a fair royalty for the technology that enables its services, Disney would rather remove features that its customers benefit from and pay a premium for, without proactively reimbursing them. So, how did we get here?
In February 2025, we asked a number of courts to rule on a straightforward question: is Disney using InterDigital's patented video technology without a license? Over the past year, courts in Brazil, Germany, and across Europe have unanimously answered that question. They have issued seven injunctions against Disney, and each one rests on the same finding; that Disney is using our inventions to run its streaming business and has not paid for them.
Our first wins came in Brazil. In September last year, a court in Rio de Janeiro granted us injunctions on two separate patents covering video compression technology used to deliver Disney's streaming services. What mattered was not just the result, but how the court reached it. An independent, court-appointed expert analyzed the technology and agreed with our position on infringement. The court reached its decision after close technical scrutiny of the independent expert and his report, and rejected Disney’s argument that it was entitled to raise a FRAND defense.
Germany came next. The Regional Court in Munich awarded us three injunctions against Disney, each on a different patent and a different piece of technology. The first covers the way a video stream is overlaid with a second stream comprising, for example, subtitles. The second covers high dynamic range (HDR), the technology that gives streamed video the depth, brightness and color once reserved for the movie theater. The third covers certain encoding technologies related to HEVC; innovation that makes high-quality streaming possible.
Then, this summer, we secured two injunctions at the Unified Patent Court (UPC), the pan-European court that now hears patent cases across much of the continent. The first, from the court's division in Mannheim in June, confirmed that our HEVC patent was both valid and infringed and applied across 11 European countries. The second, from the Düsseldorf division in July, again covering 11 countries, also required Disney to recall and remove the infringing HEVC technology. In both cases, not only did both courts reject Disney’s FRAND defense, each court found that Disney had not behaved as a willing licensee, a troubling label for a company that has a decades long history of aggressively protecting and monetizing its own intellectual property through its numerous animated characters, movie franchises, theme parks and more.
Seven injunctions, across three legal systems, on a range of different patents. This is a clear and consistent validation of the quality of our patent portfolio and of the way we have conducted ourselves throughout. Together, these rulings show the breadth of our video research, including compressing and delivering content efficiently and giving consumers the kind of viewing experience that they have come to expect when they watch the latest Disney blockbuster. Following these injunctions, Disney’s response has been consistent; degrade the quality of its service without proactively compensating, or in some cases, even notifying, its customers.
Our court wins have also led Disney to use VP9, an encoding technology which was developed in the early 2010s as a perceived “royalty free” codec and which supports 4K (but not HDR) viewing on some devices. The problem for Disney, and other infringers, is that aside from being inferior to HEVC, VP9 clearly uses technology developed by engineers at InterDigital and other companies. And, as when any of our technologies are used, we expect to receive a fair royalty for the value of our innovation given the significant investment we make in our research.
Litigation is always a last resort for us. It takes time and money that we would prefer to reinvest in our own research. Our strong preference with Disney, as with every company that uses our technology, is to reach a fair agreement through direct, good-faith negotiation. That is how the overwhelming majority of our licenses are signed.
We first approached Disney about a license several years ago. We would have much preferred to conclude an amicable agreement then. We went to court only because that route was closed to us, and only to establish what should not have been in doubt: that our innovation has significant value, and that the companies which build profitable businesses on it should pay a fair price.
And Disney has built a remarkable streaming business. Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ reach about two hundred million subscribers around the world, and the quality of the experience, the sharpness of the picture, the richness of the color, the speed at which content loads, depends on technologies that researchers at InterDigital helped to invent.
The money we earn from licensing goes back into research, into the engineers and scientists who are already at work on the next generation of video, wireless, and AI technologies. Not only are customers being harmed by Disney’s choice to de-feature its offerings, they are also harmed by the loss of benefits from the future innovation that revenue from a license deal would have funded.
So, our message to Disney is the same today as it was when we started negotiations. Stop harming customers and let’s reach a long-term agreement that reflects the fair value of the innovation Disney uses every day.