1. “Whether the district court’s order denying an antisuit injunction should be reversed because the court erred as a matter of law in finding, as a threshold matter, that resolving the underlying FRAND contract issues would not determine the propriety of Ericsson’s enforcement of injunctive relief in foreign countries.”
2. “If so, whether this Court should order entry of an antisuit injunction against Ericsson because the antisuit injunction factors support an injunction and because the impact on comity would be tolerable.”
1. “In sum, we conclude that the ‘dispositive’ requirement of the foreign-antisuit-injunction framework is met here. That is because (1) the ETSI FRAND commitment precludes Ericsson from pursuing SEP-based injunctive relief unless it has first complied with the commitment’s obligation to negotiate in good faith over a license to those SEPs; and (2) whether Ericsson has complied with that obligation is an issue before the district court. Accordingly, if the court determines that Ericsson has not complied with that obligation, that determination will dictate the impropriety of Ericsson’s pursuing its SEP-based injunctive relief.”
2. “None of this is to say that Lenovo will ultimately demonstrate itself entitled to its requested antisuit injunction. Although both parties ask us to definitively resolve that question—Lenovo saying we should outright direct entry of the antisuit injunction; Ericsson saying we should conduct the rest of the analysis ourselves and affirm the district court’s denial—we decline both requests. Such entitlement (or not) is dedicated to the district court’s discretion in the first instance and will, if the requested antisuit injunction is to be entered, require analysis of the remaining parts of the foreign-antisuit-injunction framework—an analysis that has yet to be undertaken. Here, however, in denying Lenovo’s request, the district court stopped its analysis at the first, threshold part based solely on what we conclude was legal error. We must therefore vacate that denial and remand.”
