AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), the nation’s No. 2 LCD panel maker, said yesterday it had won a patent lawsuit against LG Display Co Ltd (LGD) in the US and would seek an injunction to stop its South Korean rival from selling products found to have infringed its patented technologies in the US.
AUO will claim unspecified damages from LGD and charge royalties if LGD and its customers export products using AUO patents, company spokeswoman Hsiao Ya-wen (蕭雅文) said by telephone yesterday.
“This is a major legal victory in the history of patent lawsuits between local companies and their global rivals,” Hsiao said.
The US District Court for the District of Delaware on Feb. 16 ruled that LGD infringed four AUO patents at the center of a countersuit AUO brought against the South Korean firm in 2006, the company said in the statement.
On April 30, the US court ruled that AUO did not infringe any of the four patents asserted by LGD in the original lawsuit, after an extensive bench trial.
The court also concluded that LGD committed intellectual property rights infringement. Based on this ruling, AUO hopes that LGD’s customers will stop purchasing unauthorized products from LGD for sale or use in the US.
The four AUO patents the court found LGD had infringed include US Patent No. 6,778,160; No. 6,689,629; No. 7,125,157 and No. 7,090,506, patented technologies designed respectively to improve response time, improve reliability of LCDs, solve the problem of defects in the displayed images and provide a compact structure useful for small hand-held devices, the company said.
The infringing LGD products range from LCD panels for TVs, monitors, notebooks and public information displays to mobile phone panels, it added.
A substantial share of products using LGD’s LCD panels sold in the US for the damages period through the date of trial are infringing products, it said.
In 2006, LGD filed a lawsuit against AUO and Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corp (奇美電子), alleging that the Taiwanese firms were illegally using its LCD manufacturing technologies.
The case went to trial in June last year. At the trial, LGD claimed more than US$690 million of damages from AUO, but the Taiwanese firm was cleared of patent infringement last week.
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