Paramount Skydance Corporation (a company incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware, USA) v Nokia Corporation (a company incorporated under the laws of Finland)

Approved Judgment

(On Ex Parte Application)

This public judgment has been amended on 1 December 2025 to incorporate a section that had previously been designated confidential.

NOTE: this judgment was originally given in a public version and a confidential version. The confidential version contained (in a confidential annex), and the public version omitted, the material from the second sentence of paragraph 9 below to the end of paragraph 16, as a precaution, in case Nokia considered that it was confidential. At a hearing on 1 December 2025 Nokia confirmed that it did not assert that it was confidential so I am reissuing this judgment in a single, public version which contains the whole of my original judgment. The contents, reasoning, and conclusions are not affected.

This is the hearing of an urgent ex parte application by two companies in the Paramount Group (to whom I will refer simply as “Paramount”), for an interim anti-anti-suit injunction against two companies in the Nokia Group (I will refer to them simply as “Nokia”).

The relief was sought, as it is put in the very helpful and detailed skeleton of Mr. Purvis KC, who appears for Paramount today, to “hold the ring” and to preserve this court's ability to decide Paramount's claims in this jurisdiction until a return date

The circumstances of the application and the relief are, as Mr. Purvis submits, very similar (but not identical) to those that arose in Warner Bros v Nokia [2025] EWHC 2888 (Pat), where Mellor J granted an ex parte interim anti-anti-suit injunction until an inter partes return date. Not only is the application similar, but the overall dispute between Paramount and Nokia, which has led to international litigation in a number of fora, is really quite similar to that between Warner Bros and Nokia, in that it covers RAND obligations under the ITU regime, as they relate to coding and decoding technology for video-streaming. I refer to Mellor J's decision for a broader explanation of that strategic picture and I will not burden this judgment with it any further.

By its application and as supported in its skeleton argument, Paramount sought anti-anti-suit relief very similar to that in Warner Bros, permission to serve out by alternative means, so as to bring any anti-suit relief to the attention to Nokia speedily, and directions so that the return date of any order I made could be at the same time as the return date in the Warner Bros case, which is very probably the 1st or 2nd December.

I read the skeleton submitted and the evidence in support, which consists of two witness statements of Mr. Pereira, of Paramount's solicitors, Kirkland & Ellis, and a witness statement of a German adviser to Paramount, Dr. Schröer, carefully and I have to say that it seemed to me that Paramount was dangerously close to making the argument that it was in exactly the same situation as Warner Bros in material respects and that an anti-anti-suit order ought to follow almost automatically.

For reasons I will come on to, it is unnecessary to examine that in any great detail, but I will say straight away, and I think this is important for future cases, that there is not (and never can be) anything automatic about an anti-suit injunction or an anti-anti-suit injunction, especially in the turbulent international situation that currently applies with this SEP/FRAND type of litigation in Europe. Every application of this kind has to be keenly scrutinised by the court with the greatest care, to make sure that an anti-suit or an anti-anti-suit injunction is justified on the unique facts of the case. It remains a quite exceptional remedy.

I do not read Mellor J's decision in Warner Bros as saying anything different from that and, furthermore, at the moment, every case is even more unique (I appreciate that one should not really say something is “more unique”, but the reader of this judgment will understand what I mean) because of the rapidly fluctuating situation that arises from successive decisions of judges in this court and in the UPC, in particular.

Differences between this case and Warner Bros include, as Mr. Purvis very helpfully and rightly recognised and, indeed, as was stated in Paramount's evidence, that there is a forthcoming hearing in the Warner Bros litigation, as I have mentioned, which might condition Nokia's attitude to seeking anti-suit relief in Germany or the UPC and the timing of this litigation, which is very different because the UK action by Paramount and this anti-anti-suit injunction, are brought much later after the commencement of other litigation, including the German litigation by Nokia. These may or may not have been important differences had I had to come to consider it, but they illustrate that every case must be scrutinised very specifically before the court will ever contemplate granting anti-anti-suit relief, for all the reasons I have touched on and also because of the importance of comity.

As I have said, this is a picture that I might have had to consider in detail had events not moved on yesterday. I am likely to be the judge on the return date of the Warner Brothers AASI application and, in any event, as will come as no surprise to the reader, Mellor J and I liaise closely over the forthcoming business in the diary of the Patents Court. As a result, it came to my attention in the context of the Warner Bros litigation that a witness statement had been submitted by a Mr. Darvill of Bird & Bird, on behalf of Nokia, which stated that Nokia had not applied for an injunction in any jurisdiction seeking to prevent Warner Brothers from bringing a claim anywhere in the world...