Court cases are nothing new in the tech world. Over the last few years, Samsung and Apple have seemed to be in a constant state of battle within the courts. While more recently, the influx of patent troll cases has raised some alarming bells. Well, about this time last year, another case first reared its head in the courts between Samsung, Qualcomm and NVIDIA. The short of the case was that NVIDIA was suing Qualcomm and Samsung on the grounds that some of their processor tech violated NVIDIA patents. In particular, the patents referred to the GPU processing of the likes of the Snapdragon and Exynos processors.
At the time, indications of how likely the case would be of being successful was unclear, although, by the time April of this year rolled around, indications had began to surface that NVIDIA had grounds for the patent claims. The latest on this is that according to Reuters, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has disagreed with that notion and today ruled against the charges against Samsung. In total, there were three patent infringement being sought and two of them were ruled against outright by the ITC today. In terms of the third, things are a little more complicated. The commission did rule that the third patent had infringed on NVIDIA’s patent, although by the same token, they invalidated the patent as it was not unique compared to already existing patents.
Of course, as is always the case with this sort of thing, this is not going to be the final call on the outcome. The ruling is said to be one which will be reviewed by the full commission in February of next year and as such, the current decision cold be overturned again. It had been largely reported that NVIDIA had hoped to place a ban on the importing of products which contain the relevant chipsets that were infringing on the patents. This is something which could have been enforced by the ITC had they viewed the patent infringements to be lawful. Although, any banning on imports now looks unlikely to happen in view of today’s decision by the ITC.