It seems as though you can’t check your favorite tech blogs or websites these days without seeing a story involving some kind of patent dispute. Most of the time it’s Apple suing Samsung or vice-versa but today’s story involves Samsung with a different dance partner, LG, and unlike the tedious Samsung Vs. Apple battles this one isn’t headed to court.
Korean outlet Yohap News Agency is reporting today of a truce between the two companies with regards to a dispute over organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panel technologies. Samsung and LG have mutually agreed to close the matter “through dialogue” and without further legal action in the courts. This agreement was facilitated by a government agency in South Korea who convinced the Chief Executive Officers to meet in a Seoul hotel.
This is a great ending to a dispute dating back to 2011 that had both sides doing the usual finger pointing and making accusations back and forth. Apparently Samsung display suspected that 11 of their researchers had leaked the details of their OLED technology to LG display. Obviously this is what Samsung uses in all of their smartphones, tablets, and televisions so it was kind of a big leak.
The accusations and legal wrangling really started to gain a head of steam in September of last year when Samsung sought an injunction against LG over the 18 “confidential technologies” they say were leaked by the researchers. Samsung then also added LCDs to the list of disputed patents. They were seeking one billion won (US $920,000) for each supposedly stolen technology.
This in turn was followed by LG’s own injunction request which involved such devices as Galaxy S III, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and the Galaxy Note over things like a “viewing angle” patent. LG later added another suit against the Galaxy Note 10.1.
Isn’t it nice to see these two companies settling this out of court? Samsung must be as tired of being in court as much as we are reading about it. On top of that by the time these suits would have made it through the long legal process they would have each sold a ton of these disputed devices and probably have moved on to the next technology anyway…If only dealing with Apple was that easy.