For Infringing upon 6 TV Patents
LG Electronics has filed a patent infringement suit against TCL, claiming that the Chinese home appliance maker has infringed on its TV-related standard patents. It said TCL has ignored LG Electronics’ license renewal request for over three years.
Prior to this lawsuit, LG Electronics filed a different suit against TCL in 2019 for violating its smartphone-related patents and won it in March 2021.
LG Electronics filed a suit against TCL with the Eastern District Court of Texas in the United States on April 21 (local time). It asserted that TCL's TV products sold in the United States violated its standard patents. LG Electronics included TCL Holdings in Hong Kong as well as TCL corporations in China, Vietnam and the United States as defendants in the lawsuit.
The technologies in question included TV UI, image and sound processing, and Wi-Fi-related technologies. According to a list of patents shown on LG Electronics’ official website, the six patents are used for LG Electronics’ main TV product groups -- organic light emitting diode (OLED) TVs, Nanocell TVs, 8K TVs and 4K Ultra HD TVs.
According to a chronicle of events listed in the complaint, LG Electronics offered to negotiate more than 10 times over two years since it requested TCL to renew a patent license contract in November 2018, but TCL rejected it. The deadline for renewal of the patent license contract originally proposed by LG Electronics was the end of 2018, but the first reply from TCL came in February 2020, well over a year after that.
The first meeting about the contract renewal was held in July 2021, more than a year and five months later. However, even at this time, TCL showed a lukewarm attitude at the negotiation table by requesting additional time to measure the value of LG Electronics’ patent. Based on these journals, LG Electronics emphasized that TCL developed and manufactured products using the technology even though it was aware that at least some LG Electronics patents were infringed between 2019 and 2020.
“We had been negotiating patent licenses with TCL since the end of 2018, but TCL had not responded properly, so we had no alternative but to file the lawsuit,” an LG Electronics official explained,
This is not the first time LG Electronics filed a patent lawsuit against a Chinese competitor. Even if it is limited to cases involving TCL only, this is the third time that a patent infringement lawsuit was filed against TCL. Previously, LG Electronics filed a lawsuit against TCL for the infringement of TV-related technology patents in 2007, and the lawsuit was concluded with a settlement. In November 2019, 12 years later, a lawsuit against an infringement of a smartphone long-term evolution (LTE) standard patent was filed against TCL with the Mannheim District Court in Germany and LG Electronics won it in March 2021.
LG Electronics filed a lawsuit against HiSense, another Chinese home appliance company in November 2019 for infringing on patents on four TV-related technologies. The lawsuit was settled out of court in March of 2021.
Industry insiders cited reckless patent infringements by Chinese companies as the biggest cause of such patent lawsuits. LG Electronics took the matter head on to defend its patents and made the strategic decision to use this as leverage to slow down Chinese TV makers’ pursuit of LG Electronics in the TV market, they say.