Samsung faces $303 million jury verdict for patent infringement

Computer memory company Netlist convinced a federal jury in Texas on Friday to award it more than $303 million (about Rs 2,500 crore) for Samsung Electronics’ infringement of several patents related to improvements in data processing.

The Marshall, Texas jury determined after a six-day trial that Samsung’s “memory modules” for high-performance computing deliberately infringed five patents that Netlist accused the Korean tech giant of infringing.

Company representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Netlist’s stock rose 21% after Friday afternoon’s verdict.

Netlist, based in Irvine, Calif., sued Samsung in 2021, alleging that Samsung memory products used in cloud servers and other data-intensive technologies infringe its patents. Netlist said its innovations increase the energy efficiency of memory modules and allow users to “derive useful information from large amounts of data in a shorter time.”

A lawyer for Netlist told the jury that Samsung took its patented module technology after the companies collaborated on another project, according to a court transcript.

Netlist had asked the jury for $404 million (about Rs 3,300 crore) in damages.

Samsung had argued that the patents were invalid and that its technology worked differently from Netlist’s inventions.

The case is Netlist v. Samsung Electronics, US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, No. 2:21-cv-00463.

In separate news, it was reported that Samsung Electronics is considering replacing Google with Microsoft-owned Bing as the default search engine on its devices. The report, published by The New York Times over the weekend, highlights the growing challenges that the $162 billion (about Rs. 13,29,477 crore) Google search engine business is facing from Bing – a player miner which rose to prominence recently after the integration of artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

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