Earlier this year, the Munich Regional Court banned ASUS and Acer from directly selling their notebooks in Germany due to a patent dispute with Nokia. However, the two major notebook OEMs have reached an agreement with Nokia that allows them to sell their notebooks through agreements or by circumventing the rule. Readers may recall that Nokia's patent claims, which included patents related to core HEVC/H.265 encoding and decoding technology, forced both ASUS and Acer to halt notebook sales in Germany. Since their products use GPUs, processors, and other digital decoding/encoding engines for video, they must be licensed, and sales can only proceed with Nokia's approval. The judges concluded that the two OEMs had not demonstrated the behavior of willing licensees under FRAND rules, allowing the court to grant injunctive relief instead of limiting the remedy to damages.

However, Acer has now confirmed to its partners at a conference in Hamburg that it will resume shipping the disputed notebooks, though it did not provide specific details. In a statement obtained by ChannelPartner, Acer said, "Acer will ship products both with and without the HEVC codec. For products without a pre-installed HEVC codec, customers can activate support by installing the necessary software separately via official third-party channels." This could effectively be a circumvention of the rules, but a way to continue sales in Europe's largest economy.

For ASUS, the situation is more positive, as ASUS and Nokia have entered into an agreement to halt any legal proceedings between the two parties, allowing ASUS laptop sales to continue without issues. We will have to wait to learn more about Acer's approach to resolving this dispute before drawing any conclusions about the company, but things seem to be progressing well.