Q1 in Review: USPTO Further Narrows IPR as Top SEP Venues Solidify Plaintiff-Centric Approach

Litigation Update: Patent Litigation Stays Mostly Flat in Q1

NPEs added 495 defendants to patent litigation campaigns in Q1 2026, a decrease of 18% compared to Q1 2025 (when NPEs added 604 defendants). NPE litigation in the first quarter of 2026 exceeded the trailing Q1 average for 2023-2025 by 10% but was 6% lower than in the fourth quarter.

In contrast, operating company plaintiffs added 329 defendants this past quarter, a 35% increase from Q1 2025. Litigation by operating companies beat the trailing Q1 2023-2025 average by 33% but was also 5% lower than in Q4.

Overall, patent plaintiffs added 824 defendants in the first quarter of 2026, or 3% less than in Q1 2025 and 5% less than Q4 2025, also beating the trailing average by 18%.

Venue Update: East Texas Sees Notable Verdicts; Monetizer Revs Back Up After Delaware Scrutiny

The Eastern District of Texas was the top patent district for overall litigation (i.e., with no filter for plaintiff type) and NPE litigation in Q1 2026, also holding the number-two spot for operating company litigation. In second for overall litigation was the District of Delaware, which also held second place for NPE litigation but was the most popular district for operating company litigation. Meanwhile, the Western District of Texas trailed behind Delaware in third place for overall litigation and NPE litigation, failing to break the top five for operating company filings.

Market Sector Update: Monetization Firms and Inventor-Controlled NPEs Hit E-Commerce and Software in Q1

The top market sector for NPE litigation in Q1 2026 was E-Commerce and Software, accounting for 37% of the defendants added to patent litigation campaigns during the quarter. Consumer Electronics and PCs saw the second highest amount of NPE litigation in Q3, followed by Industrial, Networking, Financial Services, and Mobile Communications and Devices (with a tie between the last two).

PTAB Update: AIA Review Petitions Plummet Further as Reexams Spike

Over the past year, the USPTO has made series of changes that have significantly limited the availability of America Invents Act (AIA) review. On February 28, 2025, then-Acting USPTO Director Coke Morgan Stewart withdrew a 2022 guidance issued by former Director Kathi Vidal that had limited discretionary denials under the NHK-Fintiv rule. On March 26, Stewart next established an interim bifurcated process in which she would evaluate requests for discretionary denials herself, and would refer petitions not denied on that basis to panels for consideration of the merits.

Then, on October 17, USPTO Director John Squires announced that effective on October 20, he would now handle the entire AIA review institution process, including both discretionary denials and the merits/nondiscretionary factors—making those determinations with no accompanying written decisions in most cases.

One notable result of these changes has been a marked downturn in the number of petitions filed: The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw just 131 petitions for AIA review in the first quarter of 2026, including 117 petitions for inter partes review (IPR) and 14 petitions for post-grant review (PGR)—marking the third-lowest full quarter since the PTAB’s launch in September 2012, following another sizable downturn in Q4 (the PTAB’s fourth-lowest full quarter). Filings in Q1 2026 were also 64% lower than in Q1 2025, which saw 366 petitions filed.

UPC Update: Court Asks CJEU for Clarity on Long-Arm Jurisdiction as Filings Increase

Europe’s Unified Patent Court (UPC) has become an increasingly important destination for patent litigation since its launch in June 2023, offering plaintiffs a single venue with the power to award sweeping damages and injunctions that could, until recently, cover as many as 18 participating EU states.

However, in February 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) significantly expanded the UPC’s reach (as well as that of EU national courts) through its landmark decision in BSH Hausgeräte v. Electrolux. BSH did so by removing a prior restriction on EU courts’ use of their existing long-arm jurisdiction: The CJEU held that a rule giving EU national courts exclusive jurisdiction over validity actions no longer requires courts in other EU countries to stay litigation over a patent when that patent has been subjected to a validity challenge in its country of issuance.

As a result, under BSH, the UPC and national courts in EU countries may now award damages and/or impose injunctions for the infringement of non-EU patents as long as the defendant is domiciled in one of the 18 countries participating in the UPC (for UPC litigation) or in the EU more broadly (for national court litigation). Since then, the UPC has increasingly leveraged BSH to issue injunctions covering countries that are not UPC member states, including the UK (which left the EU due to Brexit) and Spain (an EU nation that did not join the UPC). Law firm Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer recently stated that this “marked” increase in such injunctions has had a “significant impact on patent enforcement across Europe”.

A notable UPC decision from August 2025 could expose even more international companies to UPC litigation risk. In Dyson v. Dreame, the UPC’s Hamburg Local Division (Hamburg LD) took BSH a step further by endorsing the concept of an “anchor defendant”—under which the UPC has jurisdiction over acts of non-UPC infringement from an entity not based in a UPC country as long as another codefendant from the same “company group” is based within the UPC.

In Dyson, the Hamburg LD held that it had jurisdiction over Hong Kong-based product manufacturer Dreame International for infringement occurring in Spain. The court determined that because a related German codefendant, Eurep, had been designated as Dreame’s “authorized representative” for product safety compliance as required to sell products in the EU, the two companies were sufficiently “closely connected” that Eurep could serve as an anchor defendant to establish jurisdiction over Dreame.

On March 6, 2026, the UPC Court of Appeal took the notable step of asking the CJEU to decide whether certain key parts of that decision related to anchor defendant jurisdiction comply with EU law—the first time the UPC has ever referred a question of law to the CJEU. It may be a few years before the EU’s top court resolves those questions: Law firm Marks & Clerk has observed that the referral in BSH “took nearly three years”, and that as a result, the issues referred here by the UPC here may not be resolved until 2028-2029.

In the meantime, the Court of Appeal has since issued two more decisions clarifying the limits of BSH. On March 13, the appellate court ruled in KeeeX v. OpenAI that the UPC lacks jurisdiction over non-UPC infringement where no related codefendants are based in the UPC (i.e., where there is no anchor defendant). Then, on March 27, the Court of Appeal held in Hurom v. NUC that it did not have jurisdiction over a Korean parent entity over claims arising in Turkey (another non-EU country) because the UPC-based codefendant in question, a German NUC subsidiary engaged in sales, had not been involved in any infringing acts within Turkey.

Additionally, on April 7, the Hamburg LD issued another Dyson v. Dreame decision that declined to exercise jurisdiction over a UK subsidiary—this time, finding that another Dreame subsidiary that is based in the Netherlands and appointed as the authorized representative for Northern Ireland cannot serve an anchor defendant for UK infringement. Here, the decision turned on those countries’ unique situation post-Brexit: Northern Ireland, still part of the UK, is still subject to some EU laws—including those related to product safety—in order to facilitate “dual access” to both the UK market and the EU single market through the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state that has an open border with Northern Ireland under the UK’s Brexit EU withdrawal agreement. The Hamburg LD found that under the circumstances, this “very special situation” was not enough to establish that the Dutch subsidiary was an “intermediary” under UK law, as would be required for it to serve as an anchor defendant for the UK codefendant.

–  UPC Plaintiffs Can Offer Insurance Instead of Paying Security Deposits, Rules Court of Appeal

Another recent Court of Appeal decision, in Syntorr v. Arthrex, could remove a significant financial obstacle for NPEs seeking to litigate at the UPC. That February 18 judgment deals with the UPC’s ability to require a plaintiff to pay a security deposit to cover the defendant’s costs based on concerns over the plaintiff’s ability to pay if later ordered. This has been problematic for NPEs, which are often thinly capitalized by design—particularly since some UPC local divisions have also refused to allow insurance policies in lieu of securities, which can in turn make it harder to obtain third-party funding.

This could now change under Syntorr, in which the Court of Appeal held that the UPC must consider litigation insurance when assessing the plaintiff’s ability to pay, and that a security deposit may not be necessary if the plaintiff has a sufficient insurance policy from an EU-licensed insurer. JUVE Patent reports that because Syntorr lowers the financial risk of UPC litigation, among other potential effects, some critics “see a wave of NPE litigation rolling towards the new court”. That said, the same article also states that “[a]ccording to industry experts, only a limited number of risk insurers actually insure such litigation in Europe”, which could blunt the rise of that potential wave.

–  UPC Resumes Publication of Official Caseload Data—Revealing Surge in Filings

Visibility into UPC filing trends was hampered last year by the transition to a new Case Management System (CMS), as a result of which the court paused its monthly reporting of official case data in July 2025. Though the two-stage launch of the new CMS was completed in September, the UPC did not resume the publication of its data updates until March 6, 2026.

That report, covering filing data through February 2026, follows a new, expanded format with a variety of additional datapoints and analyses.

The report begins with tabular case filing data broken down by Local Division and filing type, as with prior reports. While these have historically shown cumulative data covering the entire period since the UPC’s June 2023 launch, here the report includes a table showing only the remaining data for 2025 (covering June through December) and then another for 2026 to date. The report also includes various new analyses, including one showing filing trends for 2024-2026—though this chart lumps together claims for infringement, revocation, and provisional measures (i.e., preliminary injunctions). The graph thus does not show infringement-only filing trends.

However, an analysis of the reports respectively providing cumulative data for infringement caseload through December 31, 2024 (showing 239 infringement cases) and through May 31, 2025 (showing 320, for a difference of 81 cases between January 1 and May 31), plus the just-released catch-up data for 2025 (185 infringement cases), indicates that the UPC saw 266 total infringement cases in 2025.

Compared with the official total of 164 infringement cases for 2024 (as released in the court’s first annual report, and its only one to date), the court’s first full year of operations, this means that infringement filings jumped by 62% last year.

The report also includes a separate table for filings in 2026, here covering activity through February 28—showing that 30 infringement cases have been filed so far this year. The bulk of filings in 2026, as well as those reflected in the report’s supplemental 2025 data, remain concentrated in the UPC’s German local divisions, as has long been the case.

–  NPE Activity at the UPC Includes Litigation from Well-Known Monetization Figures

The first quarter also saw new UPC litigation from a variety of NPEs. For example, in late January, NIXU FL IP Protection LLC—a subsidiary of Sauvegarder Investment Management, Inc. (d/b/a SIM IP), the IP investment and monetization firm led by CEO Erich Spangenberg—filed a case with the UPC’s Hamburg Local Division against Infoblox and reseller Nomios, reportedly targeting products incorporating Infoblox’s Network Identity Operating System (NIOS) or its more advanced version, NIOS-X. That UPC case asserts a patent belonging to a broader portfolio that SIM IP acquired from FusionLayer (f/k/a Nixu Software) last year as part of a partnership with the patents’ former owner, as described in a joint announcement. The portfolio is broadly characterized as related to “Cloud Computing, Virtual Networking and Internet Protocol Address Management”.

Also, in early February and early March, Malikie Innovations Limited filed a pair of cases against Oppo and various related entities. Malikie, an Irish entity that brought its first UPC cases in September 2024, began its litigation efforts in the US—first alone, and more recently with coplaintiff Key Patent Innovations Limited.

Additionally, various InterDigital, Inc. subsidiaries filed a series of UPC cases throughout the first quarter, including multiple waves of litigation spanning several other jurisdictions. In February, InterDigital announced that it had sued both Hisense and TCL in the UPC’s Munich Local Division as well as the Eastern District of Texas, the “Munich Regional Court in Germany, in Rio de Janeiro State Court in Brazil, and in the Delhi High Court in India”. Then, in mid-March, InterDigital filed a new pair of cases in the Mannheim Local Division (Mannheim LD) against Amazon, which it has also sued in a variety of other jurisdictions—including the UK and Germany, prompting an ongoing fight over jurisdiction (as discussed further in the FRAND Update section below).

Other NPEs filing UPC litigation last quarter included inventor-controlled EyesMatch, Ltd., which in early March sued Alphabet (Google) in the Mannheim LD after the defendant filed a declaratory judgment action against it in the Northern District of California last year; and Texas-based Fingon LLC, which shortly thereafter sued Xiaomi in the Mannheim LD.

Several other NPEs also suffered notable losses at the UPC in Q1. For instance, on January 15, the Düsseldorf Local Division issued a noninfringement ruling for Google in litigation filed by Ona Patents SL, a plaintiff funded by SIM IP. Then, on March 11, the Munich LD returned a judgement of noninfringement for NVIDIA in a pair of cases cofiled by ParTec AG, a publicly traded German plaintiff controlled by the same individual behind notable German NPE IPCom Gmbh & Co KG, and Partec’s coplaintiff and “licensing agent” BF exaQC AG. That same day, the Munich LD also dismissed three cases filed by US-based Network System Technologies LLC against Qualcomm, ruling that there was no infringement in two and invalidating the asserted patent in the third.

FRAND Update: German Courts and UPC Maintain Plaintiff-Friendly Approach; Jurisdictional Battle Continues; US Details SEP Policy

The standard essential patent (SEP) space saw several major developments in Q1, including decisions from German courts and the Unified Patent Court (UPC) that further solidified an approach generally favoring patent owners. An ongoing battle in Europe over jurisdiction in disputes over global fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) licensing also continued in the first quarter, while the US government additionally provided further details on its policy toward SEP antitrust enforcement.

–  Germany: Top Court Doubles Down on SEP Approach Favoring Patent Owners

On January 27, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice reaffirmed its prior patent owner-friendly approach to FRAND licensing disputes, under which implementers have rarely been able to avoid injunctions in SEP cases, and declined to refer the matter for review by the EU’s highest court.

That decision came in the closely watched appeal of a SEP judgment for VoiceAge EVS GmbH & Co. KG, a Fortress Investment Group LLC plaintiff, against HMD. That same court established the SEP approach here at issue in its two landmark decisions in Sisvel v. Haier (Sisvel I, 2020; and Sisvel II, 2021; collectively, “Sisvel”). Those decisions set forth the court’s views on the proper application of Huawei v. ZTE, a 2015 decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that lays out a series of steps parties must adhere to during FRAND negotiations to be found compliant with their respective obligations.

Sisvel established that a SEP owner does not abuse its dominant position under antitrust law by enforcing its patents against an unwilling licensee. It also provides that parties can later remedy non-compliance with the negotiation steps laid out by Huawei, essentially allowing their application out of order (thus, for instance, allowing a patent owner to make an initial offer that is not FRAND but then later submit a FRAND-compliant offer). Sisvel additionally imposes stringent requirements on implementers hoping to make a showing of willingness, mandating that they “clearly and unambiguously” demonstrate their willingness consistently and continuously throughout negotiations. Only if the implementer makes that showing do the SEP owner’s duties come into play. The result, according to JUVE Patent, is that the implementer is “almost always considered unwilling”, especially in the Munich I Regional Court (from which this appeal originated).

The European Commission pushed back against this approach in April 2024, taking the rare step of filing an amicus brief in the VoiceAge appeal in which it argued that the less rigid application of Huawei followed by German courts since Sisvel does not comply with EU law. In particular, the Commission’s brief argued that allowing parties to satisfy the steps out of order would undermine the balance of interests established by Huawei by incentivizing patent owners to immediately seek injunctions and implementers to allege abuse of dominance without negotiating. As such, the Commission asserted that the steps must be followed in strict sequence.

Then, in its March 2025 appellate ruling in the VoiceAge case, the Munich Higher Regional Court pushed for a controversial new approach that went beyond Sisvel—most notably, by placing greater emphasis on the security that the implementer must pay to demonstrate willingness as required under Huawei step five. The decision established that a court will only make a full FRAND determination for the patent owner’s last offer if the implementer provides a security equal to the amount of that offer, that the court will otherwise decline to evaluate the FRANDness of that offer, and that this security is required for the implementer to be deemed “willing”. Since defendant HMD had not provided such a security to VoiceAge, the court held that HMD’s FRAND defense had failed—and greenlit an appeal to Germany’s Federal Court of Justice.

The Federal Court of Justice left the Sisvel approach essentially intact in its January 27 opinion on appeal (reviewed and quoted here based on an unofficial English translation). In particular, it held that a SEP owner does not abuse its dominant position by enforcing its patents in court against an unwilling licensee. The court further clarified that it is the right to seek an injunction that conveys market power in the first place—and that this right is the only means through which the patent owner can persuade the implementer to conclude a license. This forces the parties to articulate their interests and negotiate a commercially reasonable license, per the court.

Moreover, the Federal Court of Justice agreed with the Higher Regional Court that the patent owner’s first license offer does not need to be FRAND, and that it only constitutes abuse in this context if the patent owner refuses to grant a license or maintains a non-FRAND position by the end of negotiations.

However, the Federal Court of Justice rejected the lower appellate court’s ruling that it is relevant to what extent that first offer already meets FRAND requirement—both because abuse would occur through the patent owner’s refusal at the end of negotiations and not through its initial offer, and also because even the patent owner cannot “unilaterally” identify FRAND terms “without balancing the interests of the user”. More broadly, the court emphasized throughout that the FRANDness of either party’s conduct cannot be determined in the “abstract”, but must instead be determined by taking a holistic view of the negotiations process.

The court additionally held that while the patent owner has a “special responsibility” under Huawei to provide a sufficient notice of infringement, it only has further obligations once the implementer “unambiguously expresses their willingness to conclude a license agreement on FRAND conditions . . . [and] subsequently participates in the license negotiations in a targeted manner”. It is “only the willingness of the user of the invention” to take a license that “justif[ies] the requirement for the market-dominating patent owner to make an offer to the user to this effect”, the court explained. Such “mutual willingness” is essential not just to enable the parties to reach a FRAND agreement, but to articulate their interests and negotiate toward that end result.

Once the patent owner then makes an offer, the Federal Court of Justice continued, if the implementer does not want to accept that offer, it must next submit a counteroffer that it believes to be FRAND “within a short period of time”.

The implementer must then “provide appropriate security from that point on”, in particular “as soon as possible after his counteroffer has been rejected”, ruled the Federal Court of Justice. The court explicitly left open the question of whether this security must be equal to the amount of the patent owner’s last offer, as the Higher Regional Court had specified, instead focusing more broadly on the principle that the amount must be sufficient to compensate for the patent owner’s potential royalty claims. Observers have variously noted that this approach places the risk of estimating the amount of the security upon the implementer (see, e.g., here), which is consistent with the manner in which Sisvel generally sets a higher bar for such parties to clear; and that as a practical matter, the safest amount would still be what the patent owner has requested (see here).

Additionally, the court held that to be found willing, an implementer cannot engage in delay tactics, must respond promptly to a license offer, and must demonstrate a “continued willingness to license” throughout the negotiation process. The court justified this in part by explaining that the power dynamic here is different from other abuse of dominance scenarios, such as an owner’s refusal to supply, or to “grant access to an infrastructure facility”: Because the implementer has gained access to the patented technology on its own terms and initially “free of charge”, this “would not favor the market-dominating entity but rather the other side of the market”.

The Federal Court of Justice also agreed with the Higher Regional Court that it is not required to apply the Huawei steps in strict sequence—in particular, rejecting the notion that the court can only consider the implementer’s conduct occurring after the patent owner submitted its offer without first considering the FRANDness of that offer. The court explicitly stated that it was repudiating the European Commission’s contrary view on this point.

Applying these principles in the present case, the Federal Court of Justice agreed with the Higher Regional Court that the defendant had not sufficiently shown willingness—citing the timing of HMD’s responses during the negotiations, and the fact that it provided a security that was too far below the amount of its own last offer. The court also found that it would not be disproportionate to award an injunction under the circumstances—chiefly, where the court has found a SEP user to have engaged in undue delays, and where (as here) the implementer has already implemented a workaround (selling devices without the accused EVS functionality at issue). This is notable because proportionality was only added to Germany’s patent law in 2021, after the second Sisvel decision came down—making this the first SEP case in which the Federal Court of Justice has reached the issue.

–  UPC: Court Maintains German Approach in Third FRAND Decision

The UPC also continued to develop its SEP caselaw in Q1, most notably by issuing its third-ever merits decision in a FRAND case. On March 18, the UPC’s Düsseldorf Local Division (Düsseldorf LD) ruled in favor of SEP owner Dolby Laboratories (Dolby International), granting an injunction and damages against Turkish electronics manufacturer Arçelik and its German subsidiary Beko Germany over smart TVs supporting the Opus audio codec. In that decision, the court rejected the defendants’ FRAND defense, finding that they had failed to sufficiently declare a willingness to take a FRAND license as required under Huawei step two.

Here, the court adopted the more restrictive approach followed by German courts under Sisvel, as detailed above—echoing that case’s holding that “the infringer must clearly and unambiguously agree to declare that they will conclude a licence agreement with the patent proprietor on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, and must also subsequently participate in the licence agreement negotiations in a targeted manner” (quoted here, and below, based on a machine translation). The Düsseldorf LD also recounted the European Commission’s views on this factor as expressed in its amicus brief in the VoiceAge EVS appeal, in part agreeing with the Commission (and the Mannheim and Munich LDs) that the court must look beyond the declaration of willingness and consider the broader circumstances, under which the parties’ conduct is to be assessed in an “overall view”.

Applying those principles, the Düsseldorf LD found the defendants’ expression of willingness to license was “lacking”. Key here was the amount of time it took to respond to the plaintiff, finding that the defendants’ delay of “two months and just under two weeks” was long enough for the plaintiff to have assumed that no response was forthcoming. The court also faulted the defendants for merely stating that their technical teams were auditing their use of the accused technology, rather than actually declaring their willingness to take a FRAND license as required by Huawei.

Having thus concluded that the defendants had failed to satisfy the second step of Huawei, the Düsseldorf LD held that it was “no longer necessary” to address the remaining steps, the next of which would have been to evaluate the FRAND compliance of the plaintiff’s offer—an approach that the court noted was consistent with those of the Mannheim and Munich LDs. The court also held that “[t]here was no need for a referral to the” CJEU, as the questions at issue here are specific to the case at hand and can be resolved by the court here under existing EU law.

While Dolby marked the UPC’s third SEP decision to address a FRAND defense, the court has not yet ruled on a party’s request to set the terms of a FRAND license (i.e., make a FRAND determination). However, a recent decision by the Court of Appeal gave further clarity on the proper basis for UPC jurisdiction over such claims, given that standalone FRAND claims are not addressed in the UPC Agreement (the treaty that established the UPC).

On March 16, in Sun Patent Trust v. Vivo, the Court of Appeal affirmed a decision by the Paris Local Division that allowed the patent owner, Sun Patent Trust, to proceed with conditional FRAND claims that depended on its infringement claims against defendant Vivo. This meant that the court would first decide whether the plaintiff’s offer had been FRAND, and only if the court answered in the affirmative would it proceed to evaluate an injunction. In doing so, the Court of Appeal confirmed that the “main” claim was for infringement, and that it was legitimate for the plaintiff to bring an “incidental or dependent” FRAND claim that “anticipated” the defendant’s FRAND defense.

–  Europe: Jurisdictional Battle Deescalates After a Contentious End to 2025

The first quarter of 2026 was additionally marked by further developments in an ongoing international battle over FRAND jurisdiction.

This battle is the result of recent practices in the UK, where courts have adopted an expansive view of their jurisdiction over FRAND matters over the past several years. This began with the UK Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Unwired Planet v. Huawei, which marked the first time a national court asserted the jurisdiction to set the terms of global FRAND licenses. Since then, UK courts have issued a number of license rulings that have been viewed as relatively favorable for implementers. This has made the UK a popular destination for implementer cases seeking FRAND determinations.

In 2025, UK courts further upped the ante through a series of judgments that have required SEP owners to offer interim licenses in FRAND cases, further providing that a SEP owner will be deemed unwilling if it refuses to do so. This prompted concerns from Germany’s Munich I Regional Court and the UPC’s Mannheim Local Division (Mannheim LD) that the UK approach would encroach on their jurisdiction. In September 2025, those two courts then issued the first-ever anti-interim-license injunctions (AILIs) barring the pursuit of such relief in a UK case filed by Amazon against InterDigital, Inc. In doing so, both courts objected to how, in their view, the UK approach would unduly restrict the patent owner’s right to enforce its patents—the Munich court arguing that an interim license declaration would prevent InterDigital from “fully and successfully” litigating its patents in German courts, and the Mannheim LD asserting that the purpose of the UK approach was to prevent the patent owner from “initiating or continuing” parallel SEP litigation.

An escalating back-and-forth then followed, with the UK High Court soon after questioning whether the AILIs would also bar Amazon from pursuing final FRAND relief as well as an interim remedy. In late October, UK High Court Justice Richard Meade then issued an interim anti-anti-suit injunction (AASI) that barred the patent owner from preventing Amazon from pursuing its remaining claim for a final FRAND determination. The High Court left that AASI in place in another ruling issued on December 2, with Justice Meade expressing the view that this did not unduly restrict InterDigital’s ability to litigate elsewhere. Rather, he asserted that the patent owner could bring not just patent infringement claims in those courts but also “overlapping rate-setting claims if it wants”, and that the German courts or the UPC could decide for themselves if any final FRAND decision from the UK “is ineffective there”. On December 19, Justice Meade then rejected a jurisdictional challenge from InterDigital in the Amazon case.

The Mannheim LD disagreed as to the propriety of the UK approach, issuing an order on December 22 in which it argued that any interim license ruling from the UK would violate fundamental EU rights (the EU “ordre public”), and that as a result this would make such an ruling “null and void and thus unenforceable in UPC contracting member states”. The Mannheim LD further characterized a potential UK interim license ruling as having a “spill-over effect” that it is “actually a far-reaching intrusion into the legal order of a different territory, which violates comity”. Moreover, the court contended that it would “not be reasonable” for a patent owner to disregard an interim license ruling insomuch as it affects non-UK territory because such noncompliance with a court order would “giv[e] the impression of doing wrong”.

The Mannheim LD additionally posited that if InterDigital offered an interim license and continued its UPC litigation, this could constitute a breach of the license for which InterDigital might owe damages. On that basis, the Mannheim LD suggested that Amazon could already be in breach of its September AILI. The Mannheim LD also notified the European Commission about this matter “[d]ue to the possible effects of this dispute on EU antitrust law”.

As this dispute spilled into the first quarter, the Mannheim LD doubled down on these positions: The court stated in a February 11 order, issued in response to questions raised at a UK hearing held the week before, that the September AILI has always encompassed final relief, and that while the UK court may properly set a final FRAND rate, it may not take steps with “extra-territorial effects”—namely, imposing damages for any breach of an interim license or holding the patent owner in contempt on that basis. As a result, the Mannheim LD held that Amazon would be in breach of the AILI if it were to pursue any damages based on a breach of contract stemming from InterDigital’s continuation of its UPC litigation.

Amazon then emailed the Mannheim LD to state that while it “reserves all of its rights”, it did not “presently seek damages arising from any breach by InterDigital of its RAND Commitment”. The court countered that such a reservation of rights could amount to a breach of the AILI and held a hearing on February 27 in which it ordered the defendant to make a declaration to the UK court to accordingly limit its final claim for relief there or face contempt from the UPC. A back-and-forth resulted over whether the declaration made was suitably binding, with the Mannheim LD ultimately issuing an order on March 25 that found Amazon’s declaration, as amended, still did not have a “causal link” to the final order setting forth the issues to be tried, but nonetheless declined to impose any penalty. The court stated that it was declining to take further action, at least pending a decision by the UPC Court of Appeal on Amazon’s appeal of the original AILI, “in the interest of the cross-jurisdictional relationships between the UPC and the UK Courts, and therefore in the interest of comity”.

With that latest deescalation, the focus of the dispute thus shifts to Amazon’s AILI appeal, in which the oral hearing will be held on May 28. It appears likely that the European Commission will be among the stakeholders interested in the outcome: On February 2, the court thanked the Mannheim LD for its notification about the jurisdictional dispute and requested “further information sharing as appropriate”.

–  US: DOJ Details Views on SEP Antitrust Enforcement as USPTO Seeks to Incentivize US Contributions to Standardization

Q1 also saw significant SEP policy activity from the US government. Since the third quarter of 2025, the second Trump Administration has increasingly fleshed out its policy toward antitrust enforcement in SEP disputes. Now, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has doubled down on its posture toward a key threshold issue as first established in an October court filing: On March 25, in remarks delivered at the LeadershIP 2026 conference, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Dina Kallay reiterated that the DOJ’s Antitrust Division believes that there should be no presumption that a patent’s inclusion in a standard gives its owner market power.

Rather, Kallay—citing an October 2025 statement of interest (SOI) that the DOJ filed in an antitrust action filed by Disney against InterDigital—argued that the question of whether the patent owner has market power depends on two factors. The first of those asks “whether there are alternatives to the standard”—in which case a patent’s inclusion in the standard at issue would not convey market power, Kallay asserts. The second considers the patent owner’s “contractual obligations and commitments” made to the relevant standard-setting organization, since a commitment to license the patents on FRAND terms could “protect against any exercise of potential market power that could have been conferred by SEP status”, per Kallay.

Kallay also reiterated the government’s second key argument from the SOI: that a party’s litigation efforts are exempt from antitrust liability under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, based on the First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances. For this reason—and because “[p]atents are property rights, and the only way to enforce them is through litigation”—Kallay echoed the SOI’s position that “patent holders, including SEP holders, should not face antitrust scrutiny and the possibility of treble damages for seeking redress in the courts”.

The government’s SOI in that case follows two others addressing another issue that has been top-of-mind for SEP litigation: the availability of injunctive relief. In June 2025, the Antitrust Division and the USPTO cofiled an SOI in litigation involving a dispute related to the refusal of one patent owner—Radian Memory Systems LLC—to join an industry consortium requiring that owners grant a royalty-free license (an issue over which Kallay expressed concern in a September 2025 speech). That statement, for which the underlying case against Samsung has since been dismissed, is further significant for endorsing the view that NPEs should be able to win injunctive relief.

The DOJ and USPTO have since reasserted those arguments in another SOI filed in a separate case, this one filed against Samsung by Collision Communications, Inc. As did the one filed in the Radian case, this newer statement urges the court to consider an NPE’s claim to irreparable harm because, among other things, “patents can be difficult to value”. Samsung has responded, among other things warning that an injunction here “would wipe out over a quarter of the U.S. smartphone market based on one patent a non-practicing entity bought from a third party”. Collision has raised its own objections as well, arguing that the DOJ was wrong to claim that a finding of ongoing infringement cannot also establish irreparable harm under eBay.

The Antitrust Division and USPTO have also raised similar arguments with respect to SEP disputes before the International Trade Commission (ITC): In Certain Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) Devices, an ITC investigation filed by Netlist against Alphabet (Google) and Samsung, the two agencies asserted that “the general importance of an infringer’s company or technology is not the same as the public interest”. To the contrary, the statement contends that the public interest is served by the issuance of exclusion orders (essentially, injunctions) in Section 337 investigations involving SEPs.

As 2025 came to a close, the USPTO drew on the principles from the government’s briefs in the Radian and Netlist cases in its December 29 announcement that it was forming a Standard-Essential Patent Working Group (or “SEP Working Group”) to ensure that all patent owners, “regardless of their size or sophistication”, receive fair treatment and have “strong and predictable enforcement” rights for their SEPs. The USPTO stated that the SEP Working Group will have three objectives: to “[r]estor[e] [r]obust [r]emedies” for patent owners; to increase the participation of US companies, particular small-to-medium-sized ones, in the standardization process; and to “[c]reat[e] channels for dialogue with patent holders, implementers, SDOs, and other stakeholders”.

In early January, the USPTO announced the first initiative stemming from the SEP Working Group: a pilot program called “Standards Participation and Representation Kudos” (SPARK) designed to encourage certain US entities to participate in standards development. Under SPARK, small and medium-sized businesses, universities, and nonprofits that contribute technology to a standard or otherwise participate meaningfully in a standardization process would be offered a “limited number” of “acceleration certificates” that can be redeemed at the USPTO to expedite the examination of patent applications or PTAB appeals. The USPTO describes these certificates as designed to “offset the time and resources invested in standards development”, given that “resource constraints often prevent smaller U.S. entities from participating meaningfully in [standards development organizations (SDOs)]”.

US Policy Update: House Conducts Oversight Hearing of Director Squires; Secretary Lutnick Rules Out Patent Value Tax; and Senator Grassley Tries Again to Regulate TPLF

As Q1 drew to a close, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet held an oversight hearing of the USPTO, meant to examine the agency’s “mission, operations, [and] policies”. The sole witness was USPTO Director John Squires, whose written testimony is available here. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle lobbed challenging questions to Director Squires, with particular focus on the USPTO’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which could place significant new limits on America Invents Act (AIA) reviews and proposes modifications to the rules of practice for inter partes reviews (IPRs). Director Squires reports that the USPTO received more than 2,800 unique comments on the proposed reforms, which the agency is currently reviewing.

Also of note, Director Squires confirmed during the hearing that the Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) will soon be revived. Created in 1999, the PPAC and Trademark Public Advisory Committee each comprise nine private-sector individuals who advise the USPTO Director on “policies, goals, performance, budget and user fees of the USPTO”; roughly a year ago, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick removed all appointments from those committees.

Secretary Lutnick also made IP headlines during Q1, putting to rest a rumor about a potential “patent value tax”.

In August 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump Administration was considering a plan that would “transform the patent system” and in the process raise tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the US government. Citing anonymous sources, the Journal said that Commerce Department officials were actively discussing a proposal to impose a 1-5% fee on patent holders based on the overall value of their patents.

Until recently, Secretary Lutnick had not commented publicly, but in February he told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science that the rumored plan is not moving forward. More background and coverage from RPX is available here.

Also during the first quarter, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced yet another bill meant to regulate third-party litigation funding (TPLF). Several such bills have been introduced in the House or Senate over the past year, and the practice of TPLF continues to draw ire—especially from Republican lawmakers. RPX members can access an overview of current TPLF legislation here.

Patent Market Update: Westfleet Releases Its Annual Report on the Litigation Finance Market; Notable Patent Transactions Revealed in Q1

Westfleet Advisors released its annual litigation finance market during Q1, presenting transactional data from 39 US commercial litigation funders. Notably, Westfleet has recognized assets under management (AUM) as an unreliable proxy for annual financing activity for this market. Indeed, the opacity of litigation finance—not only regarding capital allocation, but also deployment—prevents precise quantification of its growth and impact. Still, the Westfleet report provides some potentially useful metrics for assessing year-over-year changes in the litigation finance space. RPX coverage of the report is available here.

–  Notable Patent Transactions Completed in Q1

Although over the past couple of months, the USPTO’s release of assignment records has gone irregular again, RPX flagged patent transfers worth noting among the records made public during Q1 (though not necessarily transacting during the quarter). Notable assignments involved Enphase Energy to PowerBridge Networks, LLC (see here); Innolux and Idunn IP Holdings LLC (here); and Xerox and Genesee Valley Innovations, LLC, an IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) entity (here).

Additional RPX Patent Market Intelligence

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