THE RATIO — one judgment, decoded twice: once for anyone, once for the profession.

In 30 Seconds

Tesla wants to sell 5G cars in Britain and needs licences to the patents any 5G device unavoidably uses. Instead of doing separate deals with each patent owner, most of them — including InterDigital — sell their licences together, through a platform called Avanci, for one flat fee. Tesla says that fee is too high, and sued in London to find out what a fair one would be — against InterDigital, an actual patent owner, and against Avanci, the platform that sets the price. The Supreme Court, unanimously, let the case go to trial: bundling your patents with everyone else’s doesn’t let you charge whatever you like, and the platform that names the price can be made to defend it in court.

What Actually Happened

Tesla wants to launch 5G-enabled vehicles in the UK — its fourth-largest market, where it sold over 54,000 cars in 2022 alone, worth some £2.8 billion. To sell them lawfully, it needs a licence to “standard essential patents,” or SEPs: patents that any product complying with the 5G standard cannot avoid using.

In 2020, InterDigital — a US company holding thousands of SEPs — told Tesla it needed a licence and gave it a choice: negotiate directly, or take a bundled licence through Avanci, a platform that packages licences from dozens of SEP owners into one flat fee. Tesla chose Avanci, for the older 4G generation.

By the time Tesla wanted the same for 5G, the platform had grown. Avanci’s 5G platform now brings together 89 SEP owners — InterDigital among them — covering roughly 170,000 patents worldwide, standing in for what would otherwise be over 7,500 separate negotiations. Tesla considers Avanci’s asking price too high. So in December 2023, before selling a single 5G car in Britain, it sued both InterDigital and Avanci, asking an English court to rule on what a fair price actually is.

A patent that becomes essential to a technical standard — like 5G — comes with a catch attached: its owner must promise, in advance, to license it to anyone on “FRAND” terms — Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory. It’s the price of getting an invention baked permanently into a standard the whole industry has to use. English courts have settled FRAND disputes for years, most famously in Unwired Planet v Huawei (2020).

Here’s the wrinkle InterDigital and Avanci leaned on: none of that machinery, they argued, was built for platforms. FRAND is a promise a patent owner makes about its own patents. Avanci isn’t a patent owner — it’s an agent selling a bundle on behalf of dozens of them, at a price it alone sets, with no FRAND promise of its own to anyone. If a licensee doesn’t like Avanci’s number, they argued, that’s a commercial complaint, not a legal one.

What the Court Decided

The Supreme Court disagreed, unanimously. A SEP owner’s FRAND promise doesn’t evaporate the moment it chooses to sell through an agent instead of face-to-face — nothing in the promise says so, and letting it evaporate would gut the point of FRAND, especially given how many SEP owners already treat the platform as satisfying that very promise. And because Avanci acts as agent for owners who did make that promise, a court can test Avanci’s price too, with Avanci itself in the room to defend it — even though Avanci made no promise of its own.

None of this fixes what the price should actually be. That question goes to trial. The Court has only ruled that Tesla is entitled to ask it.

The Landmark Line

Boiled down: pooling your patents with everyone else’s doesn’t let you outsource your way out of FRAND, and the operator who sets the pool’s price can be made to defend that price in court — even without ever having promised anyone fairness itself.

The Court explained why this actually matters with a hypothetical of its own. Suppose, it said, a court eventually rules that a fair price is, say, $24 per car rather than $32. Once a court says so out loud, binding both Avanci and Tesla, Avanci would likely have to reconsider what it charges everyone else too. Without that route, the Court noted, a platform’s rate is simply not capable of effective challenge — implementers get one number, take it or leave it, from an operator that promised nobody anything.

The Court also brushed aside a symmetry objection. If InterDigital had sued Tesla over its UK patents, and Tesla had defended itself by demanding a FRAND licence, nobody would doubt that was a dispute about UK patents. It would be strange, the Court said, if the identical dispute changed character depending only on who sued first.

Why It Matters

If you’re not a lawyer: SEP fees get built into the price of anything that connects wirelessly — your phone, your router, and now your car. This ruling means a court can actually check whether a patent pool’s asking price is fair, instead of manufacturers simply paying whatever a private platform names and passing the cost on to you.

If you bill by the hour: SEP owners can no longer point to a licensing platform as a shield from FRAND scrutiny, and platform operators are now proper defendants — not bystanders — even without ever making a FRAND promise themselves. Read with Unwired Planet v Huawei, this cements England & Wales as the default courtroom for worldwide SEP disputes: useful for anyone drafting jurisdiction clauses in a licence. It also confirms that a claim can “relate to” a UK patent for jurisdiction purposes even when the real fight is over a global licence in which the UK patents are a rounding error — three patents out of roughly 170,000 here — worth flagging for India’s own SEP disputes, mostly heard in the Delhi High Court, which will likely draw on this reasoning too. The Court was careful not to lay down a general rule for declarations against non-obligor agents beyond this case’s facts, so expect the outer edges to keep getting tested.

Quick Reference

  • Citation: [2026] UKSC 27, on appeal from [2025] EWCA Civ 193
  • Bench: Lord Sales (Deputy President), Lord Briggs, Lord Hamblen, Lord Burrows, Lord Kitchin — unanimous; judgment given jointly by Lord Hamblen and Lord Kitchin
  • Heard: 27–29 April 2026 · Decided: 27 July 2026
  • Counsel: Daniel Alexander KC, Andrew Lykiardopoulos KC, James Segan KC, Ligia Osepciu instructed by Powell Gilbert LLP (for Tesla); Thomas Raphael KC, Maxwell Keay, Sophie Ryan instructed by Gowling WLG (UK) LLP (for InterDigital); Brian Nicholson KC, Kathryn Pickard KC, Miruna Bercariu instructed by Osborne Clarke LLP and EIP Europe LLP (for Avanci)
  • Interveners: International Center for Law & Economics; Computer & Communications Industry Association; Motion Picture Association; ACT The App Association; Fair Standards Alliance
  • Key paragraphs: [64]–[65] (the test for a serious issue to be tried) · [83]–[92] (FRAND survives platform licensing) · [130]–[145] (declarations against InterDigital and Avanci) · [154]–[177] (characterising the claim) · [178]–[203] (service and the jurisdictional gateways) · [204]–[216] (forum: why Delaware wasn’t available)