Samsung, top 10 companies sued for patent litigation in the U.S. … “incessant patent war”

Samsung Electronics was named as one of the top 10 companies that suffered a lot of patent litigation in the United States last year. In the corona 19 pandemic, a patent management company (NPE), who wants to use patent portfolios to increase profits, actively pursued litigation, and it is interpreted that global IT companies, such as Samsung, with large scale and patent use, were concentrated and saturated. .

According to a report released by Lex Machina, a global patent and legal analyst on the 17th, Samsung was included in the top 10 companies with the most patent litigation in the United States last year. This includes Samsung, Microsoft (MS), Dell, and Huawei. Juul Labs, a liquid e-cigarette company in the United States, filed a lot of patent litigation last year and, on the contrary, attracted attention by raising its name as a place where many lawsuits were filed.

Most of the companies that were exposed to patent litigation showed the common point of being a large-scale global IT company with frequent use of patents. Like Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, and Huawei were involved in more patent disputes last year, but they are well known as companies that suffer the most from patent litigation.

It is analyzed that as the corona19 pandemic began around the world last year, lawsuits by companies to make profits using patents were more frequent. According to Lex Mercina, a total of 4060 patent litigations were filed in the U.S. district court last year, an increase of nearly 470 from the previous year. In the last 10 years, the most active patent litigation in the United States was in 2015 (5828 cases), and last year’s patent litigations were significant in that they showed an increase for the first time in five years.

Such active patent litigation was mainly used as a strategy to monetize by actively utilizing the patents held by companies during economically uncertain times. Even last year, there were many companies that tried to negotiate, such as reaching an agreement on the premise of signing a patent license agreement by conducting a number of lawsuits with their own patents.

The fact that the patent management company (NPE), which collects patents from various fields to form a portfolio and operates a business solely with the ownership of this patent, actively filed lawsuits is pointed out as the reason for the increase in patent litigation last year. In fact, WSOU Investment, which established a company in 2017 and obtained thousands of patents owned by Nokia, became the No. 1 company in a total of 182 patent infringement lawsuits, including a lawsuit against Google last year.

Samsung is also a representative target under NPE’s patent litigation attack. Last year, a number of OLED patent infringement lawsuits were filed in the United States and Germany by’Solas OLED’, an Irish-based NPE. This NPE has filed extensive patent litigation against not only Samsung, but also LG Electronics and LG Display, and it has been frowned upon by continuing to file a lawsuit against global companies such as Sony, which develops and produces OLED products.

In the end, in order to reach an agreement with these NPEs, there are many cases in which license contracts are concluded and patent usage fees are often spent, so companies that have to continuously sell the business and products are exposed to risks intact. If the lawsuit is defeated, the damages that must be paid are tens of billions of won, so the damage is severe.

Recently, as Samsung has become the main target of such patent disputes, it is attempting to respond to the problem and proactively manage the patent database by recruiting experts specializing in patents and intellectual property (IP) internally. As the corona pandemic continues from last year to this year, there is a high possibility that lawsuits using patents as a weapon will intensify, and domestic companies such as Samsung and LG are also looking closely at the situation.