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12 November 2018Patents

LG and Toshiba-Samsung venture end patent battle

South Korean electronics company LG Electronics and Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, a joint venture between Toshiba and Samsung, have ended their six-year patent brawl.

On Thursday, November 8, District Judge Leonard Stark ordered the dismissal of two cases between the parties, following stipulation of dismissals from LG.

In 2012, in a filing at the US District Court for the District of Delaware, LG accused Toshiba Samsung of infringing patents it said were essential to optical disc standards, including DVD+RW and/or DVD-RAM.

Three years later, Toshiba Samsung filed counterclaims in the dispute. In July 2015, the court held a scheduling conference and allowed Toshiba Samsung to sever its counterclaims from the case and instructed the company to open its counterclaims as a new case.

Toshiba Samsung, in its new filing, accused the South Korean company of infringing four patents relating to optical recording mediums (US numbers RE43,106; 7,367,037; 6,721,110; and 6,785,065).

In August 2013, the parties reached an agreement to stay the litigation, pending decisions in six inter partes review (IPR) proceedings covering Toshiba Samsung’s patents.

By March 2018, when the parties submitted a status report, five of the IPRs had been resolved, with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) finding that all of the challenged claims of the Toshiba Samsung patents to be unpatentable. Toshiba Samsung did not appeal against those rulings.

The sixth IPR proceeding was resolved in June, when the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s decision holding claims 7 to 19 of the ‘106 patent to be unpatentable.

“Thus, all asserted claims of all four patents-in-suit have now been indicated not patentable and will be cancelled,” said one of the agreed stipulations.

Both cases were dismissed.

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