InterDigital, Inc & Ors v Optis Cellular Technology LLC & Ors

This Court of Appeal decision sits in a specialist FRAND patent licensing context, but the practical lesson is wider. It is about how much confidential commercial information can appear in a public judgment after trial.

The court confirmed that there is no separate automatic redaction rule just because information may fit the trade secrets definition in the 2018 Regulations. The question is whether, in the circumstances, open justice should give way to the interests of justice itself.

On the facts, the court held that confidential licence pricing should remain redacted. That protection extended beyond headline lump sums to per-unit rates, unpacked royalty figures, and averages and totals that could still reveal commercially useful pricing information.

For a business owner, the case is mainly about litigation risk management. If your contracts contain commercially sensitive prices or rates, the court may protect them, but only where the evidence shows real commercial harm and the judgment can still be understood without the hidden detail.

The underlying dispute was between Optis and Apple about the terms of a FRAND licence for patents said to be essential to mobile telecommunications standards. In these cases, one important source of evidence is the terms of other licences entered into by one or other of the parties.

That meant the court had to work with a large number of third-party licence agreements. Some used lump-sum payments. Some involved percentage royalties. Expert evidence also tried to convert certain lump-sum deals into comparable per-unit or percentage rates so the court could compare different structures more reliably.

The full trial judgment in May 2023 was confidential because it referred to those licences and included tables summarising their terms. A public version followed in June 2023 with extensive redactions. Later, the High Court decided that a less-redacted version should be published.

That less-redacted version would still hide some lump sums, but it would reveal more text about licence terms, more unpacked percentage and dollar-per-unit figures, and some averages and totals in the tables. Several non-parties whose contracts were involved appealed because they said publication would still damage their commercial position.

The Court of Appeal said that was the real practical issue. The question was not only whether someone could reverse-engineer an exact hidden lump sum. It was also whether publication of per-unit figures and summary data would still give the market commercially useful information about what the parties were prepared to accept.

The court also identified a process problem. Some third parties had been heard earlier, but they should also have been given the opportunity to be heard before the less-redacted version was finally settled. That point mattered because it helped explain why amended grounds of appeal and Apple's later appellant's notice were allowed.

In short, the appeal was not about whether the public should see the reasoning at all. It was about where the line should be drawn between a public explanation of the court's reasoning and the protection of non-parties' confidential pricing information.

The appeal focused on the legal approach to redacting confidential information from a public judgment. The High Court had treated the law as involving an older balancing approach and a newer approach said to follow from JC Bamford v Manitou and the Trade Secrets (Enforcement, etc) Regulations 2018.

Under that approach, the High Court had protected actual lump-sum figures but was prepared to publish many unpacked per-unit and percentage figures, as well as some averages and totals. The Court of Appeal had to decide whether that distinction made sense in practice.

It also had to deal with narrower issues about factual mistakes in Annex 3, including whether obvious errors could be corrected and whether corrected wording about one licence feature should itself remain redacted.

At a practical level, the court was deciding three linked questions. First, was there really a separate legal route that automatically protected information said to be a trade secret? Second, if lump sums were hidden, could related rates and summary figures still be published safely? Third, what should happen where a judgment contains simple factual slips about a non-party's contract?

The answer to those questions mattered beyond this one dispute. If the High Court's distinction had stood, businesses might have found that even where a court hid the headline contract price, it could still publish converted rates or table summaries that gave the market much the same commercial message.

The Court of Appeal allowed the appeals, apart from one narrow point about whether corrected wording on sub-licensing should itself remain redacted. It rejected the idea that there were two separate legal tests.

The court said there is one overall approach. Open justice is fundamental, but there are exceptions where the interests of justice require protection of confidential material. The question is whether, in the circumstances, open justice should give way to the interests of justice itself.

Applying that approach, the court held that the distinction between lump sums and per-unit figures was flawed. There was no sound basis for protecting one but not the other in this case. The per-unit figures had commercial value in their own right, and even rough estimates of hidden lump sums could still damage negotiating positions.

The court gave three practical reasons why reverse engineering was not the whole point. First, a rough estimate could still do commercial harm. Second, some outside information was available that could assist the exercise. Third, even inaccurate estimates could put a business in difficulty because rebutting them might require disclosure of the very confidential information it was trying to protect.

The court also accepted a separate point made by the appellants. Even if the unpacked rates could not reliably be reverse-engineered back into exact lump sums, those rates still represented expert views of the value of the licences and could be used by future counterparties in negotiations.

For the same reason, the court held that averages and totals in the tables should also be redacted. If those summary figures were published, especially alongside some individual entries, it would be relatively easy to infer good approximations of hidden values. That would undermine the protection of the underlying financial information.

On the evidence, the court concluded that the financial information was confidential pricing data and that publication would cause real commercial harm by weakening the parties' competitive and negotiating position. The public could still understand how the court reached its conclusions without seeing those details.

The court also held that obvious factual slips in the judgment could be corrected under CPR 40.12. It said non-parties were not barred from raising accidental slips. But it was not persuaded that corrected wording about whether the InterDigital licence allowed sub-licensing should itself remain redacted, because the evidence did not specifically justify that further step.

Most businesses will never be involved in a FRAND patent dispute. Even so, the decision gives a useful framework for any case where a court may need to refer to confidential pricing or deal terms in a public judgment.

The first point is that confidentiality is not automatic once litigation starts. A contract may say pricing is confidential, and that will help show the information was treated as private, but the court still starts from open justice.

The second point is that courts can still protect genuinely sensitive commercial information. What matters is whether there is a strong, evidence-based reason to do so and whether the public can still understand the judgment without the hidden detail.

The third point is that businesses should not focus only on the obvious number in the contract. This case shows that converted rates, unpacked figures, averages, totals and summary tables may reveal much the same thing in another form.

The fourth point is that evidence needs to be concrete. The Court of Appeal was persuaded by evidence that publication of pricing information would weaken negotiating positions and affect commercially significant licensing activity. Broad claims that disclosure would be inconvenient or unwelcome are much less persuasive.

Finally, the case is a reminder that non-parties can be directly affected when their contracts are used as evidence in someone else's litigation. If your agreements may be disclosed in that way, you may need to act quickly on confidentiality and accuracy issues.

If your business enters contracts with sensitive pricing, this case suggests a practical way to prepare for possible litigation. The aim is not to claim that everything is confidential. It is to identify what would genuinely damage your business if it appeared in a public judgment.

The judgment is especially useful because it shows how courts look at information in layers. There may be the direct figure in the contract, but there may also be derived figures, worked examples, averages and totals that point to the same commercial position. If you only focus on the headline number, you may miss the real disclosure risk.

The Court of Appeal's reasoning is useful because it explains what kind of harm mattered. The financial information was, in substance, the price the parties were willing to accept to do the deal. The court accepted that publishing that information would weaken the competitive position of the parties, particularly licensors, in future negotiations.

The court also rejected the idea that the information was too old to matter. It said the more recent the information, the more sensitive it is, but even older licence data can still be commercially useful. Licences often run for years, and if the information is relevant enough to be used in FRAND litigation, it may also be relevant in FRAND negotiations.

The court was also not persuaded by the suggestion that the disadvantage would be minor. It referred to evidence about the scale of revenues involved in licensing businesses and the practical reality that licensees will push for lower rates if they know what others have paid or accepted.

That part of the judgment matters for businesses outside the patent world too. If your business wants confidentiality protection, it helps to explain the commercial setting in real terms. Show how the information would be used by customers, suppliers, licensees or counterparties, and why that would weaken your bargaining position.

One of the strongest practical lessons from the case is that indirect disclosure can be just as damaging as direct disclosure. The court was not only concerned with whether someone could identify an exact hidden lump sum. It was concerned with whether publication would still hand the market commercially useful information.

That is why the court treated unpacked rates, averages and totals as sensitive. A rough estimate can still be enough to shift a negotiation. A future counterparty does not need mathematical certainty to use the information as leverage.

The court also accepted that even inaccurate estimates can create a problem. If another party claims to have worked out your confidential pricing, the only way to rebut that claim may be to reveal the very information you were trying to protect. That puts the business in a difficult position.

For business owners, this means confidentiality reviews should look beyond the contract itself. Ask whether a table, summary, annualised figure, average, total or conversion could reveal the same commercial message. If it could, that material may need the same attention as the original figure.

This case is also a reminder that non-parties are not powerless when their contracts appear in someone else's litigation. The Court of Appeal confirmed that non-parties had standing to appeal in this context and could raise confidentiality concerns about their own information.

The court also dealt with factual mistakes in the judgment. It said the High Court's approach to the slip rule was too narrow. CPR 40.12 is not limited to parties, and there is nothing in the rule that prevents a non-party from raising an accidental slip or omission.

The court made clear that the slip rule is not a route for second thoughts, reconsideration or a substitute for an appeal. But where there is an obvious accidental error, it can be corrected even if the point is material and even if some rewriting is needed.

That matters in practice because a public judgment can affect a business even where the business was not one of the litigants. If your contract is described inaccurately, or if a draft or proposed public version contains a mistake, it may be possible to seek correction rather than simply living with the error.

Take a software company that licenses a platform to enterprise customers on different commercial terms. In later litigation, one of those agreements is used as a comparison point. The obvious concern may be the headline licence fee.

But this case shows the risk may be wider. A per-user conversion, annualised value, discount percentage, average across deals or summary table may tell the market almost the same thing. A future customer could use that information to push for lower rates, even if the exact original figure remains hidden.

That is why the Court of Appeal focused on commercial usefulness, not just mathematical precision. The issue is whether publication would still weaken the business's position in the market.

The same logic can apply in manufacturing, distribution, supply and technology contracts. If a court needs to explain its reasoning by referring to comparable deals, the confidentiality question may extend to any figure or summary that reveals what your business was prepared to accept.

This decision does not create a checklist that guarantees redaction, but it does suggest a sensible way to prepare. Businesses that handle sensitive pricing should think about confidentiality long before a judgment is drafted.

Preparation matters because once a dispute is underway, the court will want focused submissions and evidence. General statements that information is private or commercially sensitive are less useful than a clear explanation of what the information shows and how publication would cause harm.

The Court of Appeal handed down this judgment on 7 October 2025. It concerned appeals from the High Court's February 2024 confidentiality decision in the wider Optis v Apple FRAND litigation.

The court allowed the appeals on the main confidentiality issues and invited the parties to agree consequential arrangements. It also noted that redactions in the separate main appeal judgment would need to be addressed.