Video standard: Major patent administrator sues Microsoft over HEVC use

This legal dispute could end up being expensive for Microsoft: The Via Licensing Alliance (Via LA), which manages and exploits a large patent portfolio with a focus on audio and video standards, has filed multiple lawsuits against the US software giant for infringement of essential industrial property rights. Specifically, it concerns the video standard HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding aka H.265) and related standard-essential patents (SEP). This was announced on Friday by the Düsseldorf law firm Cohausz & Florack, which specializes in patent law. Together with partners from Krieger Mes & Graf von der Groeben, it has filed the relevant lawsuits on behalf of Via LA – presumably before the Düsseldorf Regional Court (LG).

Cohausz & Florack did not initially provide details of the ongoing proceedings. A spokeswoman for the law firm told heise online on Friday that the partner responsible for the case was currently unavailable. A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the company does not comment on such matters as a matter of principle. Cohausz & Florack referred to similar proceedings that it had successfully conducted together with Krieger Mes for the patent exploiter MPEG LA. Via LA and MPEG LA bundled their patent pools in mid-2023, with General Electric (GE), Philips and Mitsubishi Electric converting their partial ownership of MPEG LA into comparable shareholdings in Via LA.

Lawsuits were also filed against Huawei, Samsung and Hisense, for example

In the years prior to the merger, MPEG LA was involved in several lawsuits in Europe, particularly in Germany. The patent exploiter was able to persuade producers from China such as Huawei, TCL and ZTE to conclude a license agreement by filing lawsuits with the Düsseldorf Regional Court. In April 2022, the patent pool even filed a lawsuit against its former member Samsung in Düsseldorf for infringement of HEVC patents. The proceedings ended almost a year later with a settlement. The South Korean smartphone manufacturer agreed to a license agreement. Both sides agreed not to disclose details of the deal.

As a further "blueprint" alongside the action against Samsung, Cohausz & Florack cites a lawsuit also filed by MPEG LA against Hisense before the Düsseldorf Regional Court in 2020. The allegation here was: The Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer offers television products in Germany that use patent-protected AVC methods without making use of available license offers for them. The lawsuits sought damages and injunctive relief. Hisense then agreed to a settlement in December 2021 and took licenses. The matter is likely to be similar for Microsoft, with the HEVC codec used in each case instead of AVC.

New licensing program for HEVC successor VVC

A few months ago, users complained on the online forum Reddit that they had to pay money to play HEVC videos when playing games on Microsoft devices or under Windows. Other users replied that this apparently had to do with license fees to MPEG LA. For this reason, according to them, patented codecs such as MPEG-4, HEVC and AAC should be abandoned in favor of freely available ones such as VP9, AV1 and Opus.

Via LA does not charge a license fee for up to 100,000 units. After that, the distributor charges disc producers or streaming providers USD 0.20 per encoder/decoder when selling to end providers. The maximum annual license fee to be paid by a company is USD 25 million. In 2015 , a second patent pool was formed with HEVC Advance because some rights holders were not satisfied with the conditions negotiated by MPEG LA. Licensees were supposed to pay fees from the very first product sold.

In April, Via LA announced the expansion of its HEVC program to include the successor standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC aka H.266). This step marks "a major shift in bringing two important video coding technologies together in the same patent pool" to enable the integration and easier adoption of such processes. The EU Commission launched a draft regulation in 2023 to avoid many disputes that have arisen with the licensing system for (SEP) in the future. However, given the fierce resistance from rights holders, the initiative has not yet made much progress.

(vbr)