Ask AI · Why is Huawei suing Disney over its streaming business for patent infringement?

Author ｜ Hayward

The “value” of the patents Huawei holds is only increasing.

Last August or thereabouts, we reported that Transsion, nicknamed the “King of Africa,” filed a lawsuit in Europe Unified Patent Court (Unified Patent Court, abbreviated UPC) in the German Munich local division, after a European patent (patent number EP2725797).

At the time, netizens also joked that even if you’re the “King of Africa,” even in Europe, you still have to obediently handle things according to Huawei’s patents.

Now, Huawei is firing back again.

Recently, Huawei once again filed a lawsuit in the UPC Mannheim Local Division, alleging that an internationally well-known group company infringed Huawei’s European patent EP3211897—“a method and device for encoding and decoding transform coefficients.”

And the company being sued by Huawei is none other than Disney, the “Mickey Mouse” parent company everyone is very familiar with, along with 12 other companies under its umbrella.

The moment the news broke, it immediately caused an uproar:

Not only are Huawei and Disney—two companies that appear to be in completely different industries—somehow ending up in the same news story due to a patent dispute;

And Disney, which is said to have “the strongest legal team in the entire universe,” somehow actually got the short end of the stick in Huawei’s hands?

Disney, “responding to a call” across the universe

For many young netizens, Disney is no longer just famous for Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Disney princesses—it’s also the legal team, arguably “the strongest in the universe.”

Even some netizens joked: if, due to a plane or cruise accident, you end up stranded on a deserted island, as long as you draw a Mickey Mouse on the beach, Disney’s lawyers can arrive in no time to take you away.

Although this is a joke, it also reflects just how formidable Disney’s legal department is.

In 1989, three small daycare centers in the U.S. state of Florida painted huge murals of Disney characters—including Mickey Mouse, Minnie, Goofy, etc.—with their employees painting by hand on the exterior walls, just to keep the kids happy. This was extremely common among daycare institutions worldwide.

But Disney discovered the mural. They promptly sent a warning letter threatening to sue for infringement, demanding that it be removed immediately.

How could a small kindergarten withstand such threats? In the end, they had no choice but to compromise—scrub the drawings off to make the walls white and replace them with other cartoon characters.

Similar story, in 1987 in Japan, a primary school painted giant images of Mickey Mouse and Minnie at the bottom of a swimming pool for its graduation ceremony. After the Disney Japan company saw it in the newspaper, it also filed a lawsuit for infringement demanding the erasure; in the end, the school had to comply as well.

More recently, the once-hot video generation AI software, SeeDance 2.0, also received a warning from Disney’s legal team because it can generate AI videos featuring Disney character likenesses.

And Disney’s ability to “respond” worldwide at lightning speed is rooted in a very large legal team:

According to industry rankings, Disney’s legal department has 350+ in-house lawyers, making it one of the largest scales in the media and entertainment industry; if you look at it as a “law group,” Disney’s legal team of 1,400+ people is even more astonishing.

Even just in China, there are already thousands of Disney infringement cases on裁判文书网.

So this is the biggest contrast in the news:

How did Disney—the company that takes copyright enforcement to the extreme—end up getting taken down by Huawei?

“Strongest legal team”? Taken down

The core of this lawsuit between Huawei and Disney is precisely the European patent EP3211897 mentioned earlier: “a method and apparatus for encoding and decoding transform coefficients.”

It matters because this patent is the core technology of the HEVC standard set.

Anyone who has filmed videos with a phone knows: nowadays, 4K videos can easily be dozens of GB. If those video bloggers and program producers upload the original footage to platforms unchanged, then when we watch the original directly, not only would mobile data plans not be able to handle it—carriers’ backbone networks would also be overwhelmed.

Therefore, before a video is sent out, it must undergo ultra-efficient compression and be uploaded to the platform; when we want to watch, it is then decompressed in real time on the phone and restored.

That’s HEVC—high-efficiency video coding—and that’s what it exists for.

When we watch HD movies on B站 without stuttering, or when we scroll short videos on social media and they load in seconds, basically all these experiences are thanks to HEVC.

Compared with the previous standard H.264, it can do with about half the bandwidth while achieving close to the same picture quality. In today’s world where video traffic has already taken the largest share of global internet bandwidth, whoever controls the core patents of HEVC could become the biggest winner in the streaming industry.

And Huawei’s EP3211897 patent lawsuit against Disney targets the key link in that system: the encoding and decoding of transform coefficients.

Put simply, after video images are compressed, they turn into a bunch of digital transform coefficients that must then be processed further. Huawei’s patent optimizes the grouping and processing logic of these coefficients, improves codec efficiency, and at the same time reduces the complexity and cost of hardware implementation.

This patent has been included in the HEVC Advance patent list. If you follow Huawei’s and the patent pool’s terminology, this patent is one of those core patents in HEVC implementation that is very hard to work around.

So the reason Disney ends up losing against Huawei this time is that its streaming platform Disney+ uses HEVC technology covered by this patent when pushing videos to European users—but it’s clear that the two sides failed to reach an arrangement for licensing.

As early as late 2025, Huawei already sued Disney once in the courts in Munich. This time, it extended the front line further to the UPC. Huawei’s renewed action indicates that the disagreements between the two sides have not been resolved; instead, they’re escalating.

And Huawei is “hounding” Disney relentlessly because, in HEVC patents, Huawei’s related interests are too closely intertwined.

After all, in HEVC patents, Huawei is one of the few Chinese companies that can act as a “licensor.”

During the initial process of setting the HEVC standard, Huawei kept submitting core technical proposals, gradually amassing a very large patent portfolio. It covers multiple key links in video coding and decoding—from transform coefficient encoding to time-layer image access—Huawei has patent arrangements there as well.

This also means that within the industry, if you want to use HEVC compliantly, it’s very difficult to completely bypass Huawei.

Because Huawei occupies a key position in this patent ecosystem, Huawei later entered the HEVC Advance patent pool and became a core player with significant weight within it.

After joining HEVC Advance, Huawei is both a licensor and a licensee. On one hand, it puts its own HEVC essential patents into the pool to license them outward; on the other hand, it also obtains permission to use patents within the pool.

By 2020, Huawei had already obtained licenses for more than 10,000 HEVC/H.265 video compression standard-essential patents globally, making it one of the rare Chinese manufacturers in the top ten of the HEVC patent pool.

So even though HEVC wasn’t created by Huawei, in the related patent landscape, Huawei is still qualified to act as a “decision maker.”

Even if Disney has the “strongest legal team,” able to fly around and respond to calls everywhere, hitting this hard steel plate that is Huawei this time, it probably won’t be able to escape so easily.

With patents, you’re tough

So how will this patent lawsuit between Huawei and Disney ultimately play out?

The final ruling is still hard to say, but one thing is certain: in the end, it probably won’t go all the way to a do-or-die fight.

After all, for Huawei, the biggest value of this batch of patent assets still lies in “swapping.” Within the same set of patent pools, everyone cross-licenses each other, does their own businesses, and everyone is comfortable as they make money together.

But Disney isn’t a technology-focused player, and it doesn’t hold many chips it can trade off against Huawei. That leaves a straightforward path: negotiate licensing and pay licensing fees.

To put it plainly, patent infringement disputes in court are just a means; the ultimate goal is for everyone to sit down at the same table, sign a contract, and get things done.

Before dealing with Disney, Huawei had already gone after Roku and Transsion Holdings first. After those two lawsuits, the other parties obediently joined the Access Advance patent pool and signed licensing agreements.

Statista data shows that, by regional breakdown, Disney’s European revenue for fiscal year 2025 is about $4k. At the same time, Disney’s overall streaming business continues to improve, and Disney+ is still one of the key assets.

If Disney insists on not working with Huawei—switching the existing HEVC coding to AV1, VP9, or other non-infringing HEVC implementation methods, or rolling back to H.264/AVC—based on their scale, they could face a significant increase in bandwidth costs, and it might even end up higher than the monthly licensing fees for the patents.

In practice, compared with big companies fighting each other, the signal conveyed behind the scenes is more worth pondering.

In recent years, more and more Chinese tech companies have begun to appear on the international stage as “patent right holders,” striking back with heavy blows at overseas giants they’ve long been familiar with.

Think about how things used to be when domestic companies went abroad: if there was a patent dispute, many times it was the side sitting in the defendant’s chair. But now, the positions of offense and defense have already flipped.

Besides ZTE Huawei, other internationalized companies that have spent years operating and struggling in overseas markets—such as Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo—have also long treated patent reserves as part of their moat.

Based on each company’s latest publicly disclosed figures, as of the end of March 2025, Xiaomi had obtained more than 43,000 authorized patents globally; as of September 2025, OPPO had more than 117,000 patent applications globally and more than 65,000 granted patents; and as of the end of 2024, vivo had about 56,000 global patent applications and 21,000 granted patents.

You can say these companies have different routes, different product DNA, and different strategies for execution—but there is one thing that is becoming increasingly consistent across them:

Patents may look low-key in normal times, but when it comes to going abroad, negotiations, lawsuits, and licensing, they are the most useful ace up the sleeve.

So, when Huawei sues Disney this time, on the surface it looks like “the strongest legal team in the universe” running into an even tougher patent player. But digging deeper, it’s actually the most realistic reflection of how Chinese tech companies’ position in the global intellectual property chessboard has changed.

Author statement: personal views, for reference only