Tesla can pursue its demand for a court-determined licensing rate covering the Avanci 5G patent pool, the UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday.
The decision revives a case with consequences for how every connected car pays for the cellular technology inside it.
In the decision, the justices overturned a split 2025 Court of Appeal ruling that had shut the automaker out.
They held instead that the courts of England and Wales may have jurisdiction to set a fair rate for Tesla to use InterDigital-owned patents offered through Avanci’s vehicle licensing platform.
Monday’s ruling restores the case for trial and does not decide the merits.
What the Court Decided
At its core, the dispute turns on a foundational promise of the patent system for technical standards.
Owners of standard-essential patents — the SEPs that any 5G device must use — generally commit to license them on terms that are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory, known as FRAND.
The question was whether that obligation survives when patent owners band together and license collectively through a pool such as Avanci.
Such platforms offer automakers a single flat rate covering thousands of patents from dozens of holders.
The Supreme Court said there is no reason the FRAND obligation would cease to apply once owners combine into a pool, warning that otherwise “the utility of the FRAND obligation would be severely compromised.”
Accordingly, the justices found Tesla has a real chance of securing declarations that it is entitled to a FRAND license covering all the SEPs on the Avanci platform.
They saw a strong chance, too, of the automaker proving that the only FRAND license of InterDigital’s patents would be a global one — spanning the entire Avanci 5G program at a court-scrutinized rate.
A declaration in Tesla‘s favor would without doubt serve a useful purpose, the court added while pointing to the commercial reality that a pool license is the only practical option for many manufacturers.
The $32 Question
Tesla and its UK arm launched the case in December 2023, as the company prepared to introduce 5G-enabled vehicles in the UK.
The Elon Musk-led company is no stranger to the platform as it already held a worldwide Avanci license covering 2G, 3G and 4G patents, and sought a 5G license to equip its cars with more advanced connectivity.
What it balked at was the price — a flat, non-negotiable $32 per vehicle, which Tesla said is more than double what it pays for 4G and above the ceiling a FRAND rate would allow.
Its core argument: a pool should be held to the same FRAND commitments as the patent owners who built it — in Avanci’s case, the Texas-based platform licenses 5G patents as agent for InterDigital and 65 other holders.
The claim died twice on the way up, with the last one caming exactly two years ago.
High Court judge Timothy Fancourt blocked the licensing claim in July 2024, ruling the case against Avanci was too remote to stand alone and that InterDigital could not fairly represent the entire pool in its absence.
Fancourt pointed the parties toward Delaware’s Chancery Court, the forum the defendants had agreed to, while allowing Tesla to keep pursuing the invalidation of three InterDigital patents it argues are not new or essential to 5G.
A year later the Court of Appeal refused a restart — over a dissent from Justice Richard Arnold, who argued Tesla had a real chance of winning.
By the time the fight reached the Supreme Court, the automaker had drawn interveners from well beyond the car industry.
Tech lobbying group CCIA and the Motion Picture Association both supported the challenge — a sign of how widely the pool-licensing question reaches.
Five Supreme Court justices — Sales, Briggs, Burrows, Hamblen and Kitchin — have now sided with the dissent, unanimously.
Avanci’s Warning and Response
Avanci had argued that letting implementers bring FRAND claims against pool operators would threaten settled practice across the licensing market and make courts the ultimate arbiter of essential-patent terms.
On Monday, Avanci Vehicle president Laurie Fitzgerald said the platform respectfully disagrees with the decision and continues to view the automaker’s claims as without merit.
The ruling does not determine whether “Tesla’s attempt to pay less than the widely adopted global price” will ultimately succeed, the platform said, adding that neither the 5G program’s terms nor existing license agreements change as a result.
Why It Matters Beyond Tesla
The economics at stake scale with every connected vehicle built.
A $32-per-car rate is low on one vehicle and enormous across the industry. At Tesla‘s global volumes alone, the posted rate implies tens of millions of dollars a year.
The wider car industry, much of it already licensed through Avanci, ships tens of millions of connected vehicles annually.
Until Monday, an automaker facing the pool’s posted price had no clear path to ask a court whether that price is actually FRAND.
