Innovation & IP Asset Consulting
Convergence for divergent trends

Kaercher stops copies in China

China, January 2013: Kaercher, a German company specialized on cleaning technology, fully succeeds in China in a lawsuit versus the China based company Wenzhou Haibao. Kaercher is now able to stop copying products of a high-pressure cleaners. This case is an example of the increasing legal certainty in China regarding IP. Also Chinese companies investing in R&D suffer more and more by copies from Chinese competitors. Thus, in more than 90% of all IP suits in China only domestic companies are involved.

Essential patent threat for Marvell

Pittsburgh, USA, December 2012: The Californian chip-manufacturer MARVELL has to pay 1.17 billion dollars damages to the Carnegie-Mellon-University. The suit has been based on two patents and could be tripled in case of willful infringement. The two patents from the years 2001 and 2002 are directed to the noise filtering during the reading of hard disc drives. These damages are very essential for MARVELL generating an annual turnover of less than 4 billion dollars.

Vringo continues suing ZTE

Mannheim, Germany, December 2012:  VRINGO GmbH – a subsidiary of VRINGO, Inc. – has initiated a patent infringement lawsuit filed against ZTE Corp., China, and its German subsidiary, ZTE Deutschland GmbH (“ZTE”). This is just one among a series of several corresponding multi-national suits. VRINGO is a company engaged in the innovation, development and monetization of mobile technologies and intellectual property and is considered to be one of the so-called patent trolls or NPEs.

LG requests to stop selling cars from BMW and AUDI in Korea

LG has started patent litigation in Korea and tries BMW and AUDI to stop selling the respective automobile models in Korea. The subject matter of the suit are LED flood lights by OSRAM which have been implemented in the auto models. This is probably a counter-attack as OSRAM had started patent litigation in Korea earlier with the attempt to force LG and SAMSUNG to stop exporting several types of LEDs. Corresponding suits had also been established in the U.S., Japan and China before.