U.S. Court Sides with Samsung
Samsung Electronics has won a lawsuit against SmarTen, a U.S. patent troll. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Samsung Electronics, saying that the patents which SmarTen claims are nothing more than abstract ideas that cannot be legally protected.
SmarTen filed an appeal of a lower court’s ruling in 2017 in its litigation against Samsung Electronics USA, claiming that the “S Health” application on Samsung's smartphones infringed upon its four technology patents, which are related to distance calculation, diet, weight, and exercise monitoring.
However, the court sided with Samsung Electronics by saying that SmarTen’s claim is based on abstract ideas that do not deserve legal protection. This means that the court of upheld the judgment of a U.S. federal district court.
SmarTen is considered one of the leading global patent trolls along with UniLoc, which filed four patent infringement lawsuits against Samsung in 2017. These companies are notorious for targeting a number of Korean information technology (IT) companies including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Kakao and Nexon.