Aylo, the parent company of adult streaming giants Pornhub and Brazzers, has scored another significant legal victory over Dish Network in a high-stakes international patent dispute centered on adaptive-rate video streaming technology.

In short, they’ve been fighting a battle about the way you stream your porn for years.

In a decision handed down Friday by the Unified Patent Court (UPC) in Mannheim, Germany, a panel of judges dismissed Dish’s claims that Aylo infringed on its EP 2 479 680 patent, which covers methods for presenting rate-adaptive streams. The court found that Aylo’s platforms do not make literal use of the technology, nor did they infringe upon it by equivalence.

This follows a series of defeats for Dish in its broader legal campaign against Aylo, including:

• Dismissal of an infringement suit in mid-May at the Munich Regional Court concerning a second patent, EP 3 822 805.
• Revocation of EP 805 by the UPC’s Central Division and subsequently by the European Patent Office’s (EPO) Opposition Division, which found the patent included “added matter.”
• Partial revocation and limitation of EP 680, which was upheld only to the extent of an auxiliary request in Friday’s judgment.

Dish, through its legal team at A&O Shearman, has argued that Aylo’s adaptive streaming technology infringed on key aspects of its patents covering how video quality adjusts to internet speed. Aylo, represented by the prominent intellectual property firm Bardehle Pagenberg, consistently countered that its technology operates differently and falls outside the scope of Dish’s claims.

So far, courts across Europe have sided with Aylo, including key venues in Munich, Paris, and Mannheim, as well as the EPO. The case has touched four jurisdictions: Germany, the UK, the UPC, and the United States.

The patents in question form the foundation of Dish’s intellectual property portfolio related to modern streaming technologies. A win could have had significant implications not just for Aylo but for other streaming providers using similar adaptive streaming methods.

For Aylo, owned by Ethical Capital Partners, the rulings represent not only a legal win but a strong defense of its global adult streaming infrastructure, which supports millions of users across its platforms.

Meanwhile, Dish, which satellite communications conglomerate EchoStar owns, has not yet announced whether it will appeal the Mannheim or Munich decisions.