InterDigital wins eighth injunction against Disney in patent dispute

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) in Düsseldorf has ruled that InterDigital holds a valid patent covering the technology that lets users cast or share video content seamlessly between devices, and that InterDigital is entitled to an injunction against Disney over its use of that technology without a licence.

The injunction covers Germany and the Netherlands.

This is the third injunction InterDigital has won against Disney at the UPC, and the eighth overall since the dispute began in February 2025.

InterDigital has now won injunctions from courts in Brazil (September 2025), covering video compression technology; three from the Munich Regional Court in Germany, covering video-stream overlay (e.g. subtitles), HDR, and HEVC video encoding; and two from the UPC covering HEVC encoding, applying across 11 European countries (Mannheim, June 2026; Düsseldorf, July 2026)

Rather than take a licence to clear the dispute, Disney has chosen to switch off the affected features instead.

InterDigital says that has resulted in fewer or inferior features for Disney+ Premium subscribers in the 11 European countries covered by the July injunction (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Sweden):

In Germany, 4K UHD, HDR and Dolby Vision have been switched on and off at least three times in the last six months. Meanwhile, following the Düsseldorf UPC ruling, Disney removed 4K and HDR entirely across all 11 affected countries.

It has switched to what InterDigital calls a “less efficient video codec (VP9)” rather than licence the disputed technology (HEVC) to restore 4K on some devices, and HDR remains unavailable in every affected market.