Acer and ASUS have been dealt a blow in court, which has now banned the two companies from directly selling certain products in Germany. The dispute revolves around the use of the H.265/HEVC video standard used in many integrated and discrete graphics solutions for encoding and decoding video content. Nokia, which holds the patent for H.265/HEVC, successfully won its case in the Munich regional court, whereby ASUS and Acer were found guilty of infringing on its standard-essential patents (SEP) and had injunctions placed upon them. The two companies will be unable to directly sell any products in the German market that utilize the aforementioned video codec until they reach an agreement with Nokia. This includes any PCs or laptops. The following per HardwareLuxx (via VideoCardz):
“Acer has officially and temporarily suspended sales of notebooks and desktop PCs in Germany and plans to offer only monitors and accessories in its own online shop. ASUS’s German product pages for many systems are also no longer regularly accessible, effectively halting direct sales.”
– HardwareLuxx
The ruling only affects direct sales from the manufacturers, so it does not completely cut off all sales. Retailers such as Amazon and other outlets are not prohibited from selling their products, but may experience delays depending on their supply channels. These two companies are not the only ones to have encountered legal complications with Nokia over the use of its video patents, as Hisense also did but managed to reach an agreement allowing its sales to continue. Acer issued the following statement regarding the latest court ruling (via PC Welt):
“Acer respects the intellectual property of other companies and organizations. Following a ruling by the Munich I Regional Court (Case No. 7 O 4100/25 of January 22) between Nokia and Acer, we have had to temporarily suspend our sales activities in Germany for the affected products. At the same time, we are examining the possibility of pursuing further legal action to reach a fair solution as quickly as possible. While the proceedings are ongoing, we cannot comment on any further details. Numerous product categories, such as monitors, routers, e-scooters, and accessories, remain unaffected by the ruling and are available.”
According to its patents licensing web page, Nokia has invested over $177/€150 billion into over 5000 inventions since 2000, and says that its R&D department continues to receive over $4.7/€4 billion annually. Needless to say, the company has a financial stake in its legal licensing claims.
“Nokia has been instrumental in the development of market-adopted video codecs, including the Advanced Video Coding Standard (AVC/H.264), the High Efficiency Video Coding Standard (HEVC/H.265) and the Versatile Video Coding Standard (VCC/H.266).
We have a leading portfolio of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) and a broad scope of non-SEPs that cover every main area of the H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC standards.”
-Nokia
It will be interesting to see if Acer and/or ASUS choose to fight the ruling or pursue reaching an agreement with Nokia to resolve the matter. The two manufacturers could effectively disable H.265 support via firmware updates to hardware featuring it, but that could also significantly damage sales, given the widespread use of the codec for both content creators and the average user.