A fair-licensing promise holds even inside a patent pool, and a giant salamander surfaces from a museum drawer

The dispute turns on how thousands of these standard-essential patents, the ones that cannot be avoided while building a working 5G device, are sold together. Rather than negotiate with every owner, a manufacturer can buy a single blanket licence from Avanci, which runs a pool holding around 170,000 patents declared essential to the 5G standard on behalf of more than 65 owners.[1] Avanci sets one price for the whole bundle, and for connected cars that price is a flat 32 dollars per vehicle.[3] Tesla argued the flat rate was above a fair one, and before selling 5G-enabled cars in Britain it went to court in December 2023 to have a judge decide what a fair licence should cost.[1]

Twice the lower courts turned Tesla away without a trial. The High Court held in July 2024 that an English court had no business fixing the terms of a global pool licence and struck the claim out.[1] A divided Court of Appeal agreed the following year, though one of its judges, Lord Justice Arnold, dissented and would have let the case proceed.[1][4] The Supreme Court has now vindicated that dissent.[4]

Its reasoning fixes on the wording of the promise itself. The five justices could find nothing in the licensing rules of the European standards body that would switch the fair-licensing duty off once two or more owners chose to license their patents together through an agent.[1] If a pool could extinguish the duty, they reasoned, a manufacturer with no realistic alternative to the pool's blanket terms would have no way to test whether those terms were fair, which is the very protection the promise exists to provide.[1] The court also held that an English judge does have the power to rule on whether a proposed licence is fair, even when the only licence on offer is a worldwide one.[1]

The ruling decides nothing about the 32-dollar rate itself. It restores a claim that two courts had thrown out and sends the question of what Avanci may fairly charge to a full trial.[2] Its wider importance is structural. Pools have become the usual way to license the patents inside phones and, increasingly, cars, precisely because bundling spares everyone thousands of separate negotiations.[3] By holding that the fair-licensing promise travels with the patents into the pool, the court stops the pool's convenience from quietly removing the one check the standards system was built to guarantee.[1]

Giant salamanders are the largest amphibians alive, heavy river-dwellers that can pass a metre in length and take in oxygen through folds of skin that need cold, fast, well-aerated water.[3] The family clings on in only three parts of the world, the mountain streams of Japan and China and the rivers of the eastern United States, and its fossil record is thin.[2] The Kyushu vertebrae had long been filed under Andrias, the living genus that includes the Japanese giant salamander.[1] When the Kyoto team looked again with CT scanning and careful measurement of the bones' shape, one mid-body vertebra carried a combination of features seen in no known member of the family, enough to set the animal apart as a genus of its own.[1][2]

What lifts the find above a taxonomic footnote is where it lived. The rock that held the bones was laid down in an ancient lake and marsh rather than a river, and the researchers read the animal as a creature of that calm water.[2] That is an inference, not a settled fact, drawn from the setting and the unusual anatomy together rather than from any single feature that could only work in still water.[2] If it holds, it means the giant salamander family once occupied a habitat its survivors have wholly given up, widening the range of lives these animals are known to have led.[2]

Why the lake-dweller disappeared while its river cousins endured is, for now, a hypothesis. The team suggests that the global cooling which set in around two and a half million years ago shrank the warm, still waters it relied on, while salamanders already suited to cold mountain streams carried on much as before.[2][4] Three bones cannot settle that story, and the authors are careful to call it speculation.[2] The steadier lesson is about collections. A lineage unknown to science had waited in storage since the 1990s, legible only once someone measured the bones afresh, a reminder that a museum's back rooms hold discoveries as surely as its field sites do.[2]

The agreement covers the part of a megaproject that usually goes unremarked, the paperwork that fixes who answers for what. Control is split between two centres: a project company based in Casablanca, jointly owned by Nigeria's national oil company and Morocco's state hydrocarbons agency, to build and run the line, and a higher authority based in Abuja to oversee it across borders.[4] A separate agreement between the two countries' heads of state is expected later in 2026, and a final investment decision, the point at which money is actually committed, is targeted for the end of the year.[2][3]

On paper the line is vast. It would run about 6,900 kilometres through thirteen countries, from Nigeria along the coast to Morocco, where it would connect to the existing Maghreb-Europe pipeline that reaches Spain.[2][4] At full capacity it is designed to move 30 billion cubic metres of gas a year, roughly half of that earmarked for Morocco and for export to Europe.[2] The Moroccan section alone, detailed only recently, would stretch 2,220 kilometres, most of it onshore, in a 48-inch pipe fed by four compressor stations spaced along the coast.[3]

The plan is not new. It descends from a Nigeria-to-Morocco pipeline first sketched in memoranda of understanding from 2016, and its progress has been measured in agreements rather than trenches ever since.[2] Two things explain the current push. Nigeria wants a route to sell gas it cannot easily move, and Europe, having cut its reliance on Russian supply, wants sources that do not run through contested waters.[2] Morocco has reorganised to match. Its state hydrocarbons agency was turned into a joint-stock company, a change decided in February 2026 and formalised by royal decree in June, expressly so it can raise capital and take on debt for projects of this scale.[5]

The Atlantic route is not the only bid to carry Nigerian gas north. A rival plan, the Trans-Saharan pipeline, would take a shorter overland path through Niger to Algeria and the Mediterranean, and the two projects compete for the same gas and the same European buyers.[6] Neither has raised the money to be built.[4] The West African agreement does not settle that contest, but it does change the Atlantic project's standing. A corridor that the governments along its route have written into a treaty, with named bodies to run it, is harder to walk away from than a memorandum and easier to lend against, which for a project this size is much of the battle.[1][4]