Translated by Tianxia Jia
55 patent infringement lawsuits were launched in the US
From July to August 2020, 55 patent infringement lawsuits in the semiconductor field were filed, and 60 US patents were involved. All these lawsuits were launched in the United States.
Diverse Nationality of the patent applicant
Among the 60 patents involved in the litigation from July to August, the initial applicants of 33 patents were from Japan, and the main applicants involved were Sharp Kabushiki Kaisha, NEC Corporation, Japan Display, etc. The initial applicants of 20 patents involved in the litigation are from the United States, and the main applicants were IBM, Health Discovery Corporation, The Regents of the University of California. There are three patents where the applicants are from Taiwan of China, and the main applicant is Industrial Technology Research Institute. The Cayman Islands also contribute to two patents, and the other four patents involved in the litigation were from Finland and Canada.
Figure 1 Distribution of Patentee Nationality
NPE Litigation activities show an increasing trend
Out of the 60 semiconductor patents involved in the litigations, 57 have been transferred. Among them, the patent with the greatest number of transfer assignment is US6516147B2, with 14 transfers in total. During the transfer process of the patent, the patent right changes hands many times, and the distribution of final patent owners are quite different from that of the original patent applicants. The primary patent owners of the litigated patents and the number of patents in the corresponding fields are shown below:
Table 1 Patentee technical Field
Out of the top 7 patentees, 4 of them are NPE companies (VISTA PEAK VENTURES, LEDCOMM LLC, AURIGA INNOVATIONS and Cedar lane). VISTA PEAK VENTURES has filed 12 litigation patents in the display field. LEDCOMM LLC mainly targets the patents of LED devices, and 8 patent litigations were filed.
Compared with the activities in May to June this year, NPE litigation activities in July to August showed an increased trend again.
Displays, LED devices are mainly involved in the litigation
Out of the 55 patent lawsuits initiated from July to August, 23 were related to display devices and 12 were related to light‐emitting devices. The technical fields involved in other lawsuits were transistors, image processing, and support vector machines, imaging devices, integrated circuits, virtual reality, etc.
The relationship between the plaintiff and defendant in major patent litigation and the technical fields involved in the litigation are shown below (the area of the transition area is positively related to the number of patents involved):：
Figure 2 Relationship Diagram of Plaintiff and Defendant
From July to August, the patents involved in litigations mainly include display devices, light‐emitting devices, transistors, image processing, etc. The plaintiffs involved in the litigation related patents of display devices are mainly Vista Peak Ventures, Japan Display and Panasonic Liquid Crystal Display. In the litigation of light‐emitting devices, the patents were mainly owned by the Regents of the University of California and LedComm. Auriga Innovations appeared to be more focused on its transistor‐related patents and initiated 12 lawsuits.
Detailed technical field of 60 patents involved in the litigation
Figure 3 Technical Field Ranking of Litigated Patent
Huawei launched its first lawsuit in the United States
As we all know, in the field of 5G, the Chinese company Huawei has been at the forefront of the world. As of January this year, there were 21,571 5G standard patent declarations in the world, of which Huawei owned 3147, ranking number one in the world. Huawei's outstanding achievements in the 5G field threatened the dominance of the United States in the field of science and technology. The United States has been suppressing Huawei since last year, and this year it has intensified even more with a nationwide effort and requested its allies to ban Huawei.
On July 18, 2020, Huawei formally initiated a lawsuit against the United States. It will initiate patent infringement lawsuits against US telecommunications operators and suppliers such as HP, Verizon, and Cisco, and require these operators and suppliers to pay Huawei for royalties. A total of 7 billion yuan in patent fees. This is the first time that Huawei has taken the initiative to launch a counter‐fight against American companies after being banned by the US.
Huawei claims that Verizon uses Huawei's technology and products acquired from Cisco and Hewlett‐Packard, but none of these three companies paid Huawei the corresponding patent fees. In other words, the US telecommunications company used Huawei's over 200 5G patents, but did not pay Huawei any patent fees. Now Huawei has officially started to defend its rights and sued US telecommunications companies. In addition to patent claims, Huawei also announced to the world its ownership of most 5G patents.
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