South Korea is a manufacturing powerhouse for items ranging from chips and displays to automobiles, but the country’s companies have been feeling a growing threat from rivals in China. Last month, prosecutors said a former Samsung Electronics executive was arrested on suspicion of stealing company technology for a copycat chip factory in China, jeopardizing national economic security. Now, Samsung has taken another shot at the Chinese rival, filing a lawsuit against BOE Technology for allegedly infringing five of its patents for displays used in mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone 12.
Samsung is asking a federal jury in Texas to award damages for the infringement of patents regarding organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays supplied by BOE. Samsung Display, a unit of Samsung Electronics, also seeks an injunction from the court to halt the import and sale of the affected displays. The case was filed on Wednesday in a US court in East Texas known for closed hearings and rulings.
The complaint argues that BOE is selling its iPhone screens to independent repair shops in the United States, which then replace the original Samsung displays with the copycat Chinese ones to offer cheaper repairs to iPhone owners. It also claims that the replacements infringe on Samsung’s Diamond Pixel technology, which involves placing red, blue, and green dots in the shape of diamonds to maximize visual clarity on display panels.
In December last year, Samsung filed a similar complaint with the United States International Trade Commission against 17 independent US repair shop chains that source parts and panels from various suppliers, including BOE. That complaint was based on the idea that those US wholesalers are importing and selling “counterfeit OLED components and displays” in violation of several of Samsung’s OLED patents, including one related to Diamond Pixel technology.
This latest case differs from that because it’s explicitly aimed at BOE rather than the wholesalers named in the earlier complaint. Nonetheless, the same arguments are made in the filing, which could damper the right-to-repair movement for consumer electronics, reports Louis Rossman, a technology YouTuber and owner of an iPhone repair business.
Samsung’s appeal of the earlier case focuses on the jury’s determination that it should have awarded damages equal to the “increased sales value of Apple’s smartphones” because they included BOE-sourced OLED display technology. The appeals court ruled that this calculation was flawed, noting that the innards of a smartphone are not sold separately from its shell and should therefore be considered the same as a new article of manufacture when determining damages.
In addition to appealing the jury’s decision, Samsung is seeking a review of the methodology used by Rembrandt’s expert in calculating its proposed reasonable royalty rate. That expert, Michael Weinstein, compared the price of two identical smartphones purchased from Texas Instruments — one with EDR functionality and the other without. He concluded that a reasonable royalty would be between $5 and $11.9 million per infringing device.
