Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount v Nokia: Patents Court sets interim RAND payment for global video streaming licence

The Patents Court has determined the interim payment to be made by Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) and Paramount in RAND proceedings concerning Nokia's video patent portfolio, in a judgement that illustrates how English courts approach interim licence determinations where the parties' valuations diverge by orders of magnitude.

The Agreed Mechanism

The proceedings arise from a global dispute over Nokia's Video Portfolio (NVP), covering encoding and decoding patents central to video streaming. Following a hearing before Mr Justice Meade in January 2026, Nokia proposed a resolution that became the "Agreed Mechanism": both streaming groups withdrew all parallel litigation worldwide, agreed to a global RAND licence to be settled by the court at trial, and consented to the court determining any interim payment in the meantime. The arrangement represents a significant example of parties channelling a complex, multi-jurisdictional dispute into a single UK RAND determination rather than pursuing simultaneous litigation across multiple fora.

The parties' positions

The gulf between the parties was striking. WBD and Paramount argued that the final RAND rate should be determined by reference to rates charged by video codec licensing pools, scaled to reflect the size of the NVP. Their approach produced a lower bound of approximately $250,000 to $300,000 for the final licence, excluding interest and payments for past use stretching back to 2011. Nokia's primary position, relying on a series of bilateral licence agreements with third parties, produced figures roughly three orders of magnitude higher.

The Nokia Lump Sum Offer

A significant feature of the proceedings was the Nokia Lump Sum Offer (NLSO), made by Nokia to Paramount in 2024 and covering a defined licensed period. Meade J gave it considerable weight, identifying three advantages: its relative simplicity, the fact that it constituted an actual offer, and that it was made directly between Nokia and one of the parties before the court for the same portfolio. The court treated it as a more reliable starting point for the interim assessment than either Nokia's bilateral licence comparables or the streaming companies' pool scaling method, neither of which could be tested without conducting a mini-trial.

Payment for past use

A central dispute concerned how far back the interim award should extend. The Court of Appeal in InterDigital v Lenovo [2024] EWCA Civ 743 had confirmed that all past use should generally be paid for under a FRAND licence. Meade J accepted that principle but identified features distinguishing the present case: Nokia had not sought to monetise its video patents until considerably after 2011, and the streaming industry had developed on a widespread assumption that codec royalties would be borne by device manufacturers rather than content providers. These factors introduced sufficient doubt to warrant an adjustment to the calculation, though compound interest remained payable on whatever past period was ultimately applied.

The mid-point approach

Meade J acknowledged that the conventional mid-point approach presented difficulties here. Unlike many FRAND disputes, there had been no meaningful convergence between Nokia's bilateral comparable case and the streaming companies' pool scaling method; the two are conceptually incompatible rather than simply numerically far apart. Rejecting pool scaling at trial would not nudge the figures slightly in Nokia's favour but would produce a step change of tens of millions of dollars. The court modified the mid-point approach in an admittedly subjective way, factoring in both the possibility that Nokia might succeed on its bilateral comparables at trial and the residual doubt over full recovery to 2011.

The non-refundable component of the interim licence was agreed between the parties. The refundable amounts, redacted in the public version of the judgement, were set at separate figures for Paramount and WBD respectively, reflecting an agreed 4:3 subscriber-number ratio between them.

[2026] EWHC 1505 (Pat) | Decided: 24 June 2026 | Mr Justice Meade