14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia uses a large number of technologies in their GPUs, some of which are developed in-house and other licenses from third-party companies. One of those companies just sued Nvidia for patent violations.
Companies getting sued for violating patents is actually pretty normal in today’s world, and most of the time trials never reach a conclusion. Things get settled outside of the court and business goes back to normal.
Sometimes, rival companies accuse each other of the same stuff, of using patents in their products. For the most part, this type of accusations is also resolved out of the court system because no one wants to be in the news for the wrong reasons. And having someone accusing you of illegally using their patents is definitely the wrong reason.
Not just a patent troll
The tech industry is also home to so-called patent trolls, companies who register generic patents and then sue everyone in the hope that some will be willing to settle, even if they did nothing wrong, to avoid the publicity.
According to a report on TomsHardware and citing Seeking Alpha, Nvidia is being sued by a company called Xperi. This is no patent troll, and it’s actually licensing various technologies across the world, to the likes of Samsung and Sony.
“In addition, today we filed a lawsuit against NVIDIA for patent infringement. We believe that NVIDIA is using our patent semiconductor technology in certain of its CPUs and processors and we have been speaking with NVIDIA for several years about taking a patent license. We ultimately could not reach an agreement, and we felt that we needed to take this action to defend our intellectual property rights. We filed the case in Delaware Federal Court asserting five patents,” said Xperi’s CEO, Jon Kirchner.
The lawsuit was filed in an U.S. Delaware Court, and lists the infringed patents (5,666,046; 6,232,231; 6,317,333; 6,849,946; and 7,064,005), but there is no mention of damages or request. Since Xperi won a number of these suits over the years, it’s likely that things will be resolved quickly.