Unpaid licenses for the use of patents relating to the video codec H. 264 are Lenovo’s undoing: Due to an injunction, Nokia Lenovo has to reduce sales in Germany to a minimum. The manufacturer is currently no longer allowed to sell any devices with a graphics card or graphics unit.

Lenovo draws attention to the limited range on its own website. Smartphones and PC accessories such as mice and docking stations are still available. Desktop PCs, notebooks and tablets can no longer be ordered from the official store. Other retailers continue to sell their inventory, but are apparently not allowed to reorder affected products. Bloomberg reports that Nokia accuses the world’s largest PC manufacturer Lenovo of not making reasonable offers for licenses to use its own H. 264 – having submitted patents. Lenovo contradicts that Nokia is demanding unfairly high fees and is not negotiating according to the so-called FRAND model (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory).

By stopping sales, the court wants to force both companies to the table so that they can negotiate a license agreement.

Background to H. 264 The video codec H. 264 compresses videos to transfer rate to save. Corresponding hardware encoders and decoders for accelerating the codec are found in all modern GPUs – in graphics cards as well as in combination processors or mobile systems-on-chip (SoCs). Nokia is targeting end device providers in the license agreement and not chip manufacturers such as AMD, Intel, Nvidia or Qualcomm. In addition to Germany, there are also proceedings against Lenovo in the USA, Brazil and India.

H. 264 aka MPEG- 4 / AVC as well as the successor H. 265 alias HEVC of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). For years the patents were administered by two groups, which not all of the companies involved joined. In the summer 2020 the MPEG restructured after founder Leonardo Chiariglione resigned.

The open and license-free AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) standard is currently establishing itself as an alternative to the MPEG codecs. The responsible Alliance for Open Media includes industry leaders from the semiconductor and streaming industry. Netflix and YouTube are already using AV1. Nvidia’s ampere graphics cards GeForce RTX 3000 already decode with