Computer-memory company Netlist convinced a federal jury in Texas on Friday to award it more than $303 million (roughly Rs. 2,500 crore) for Samsung Electronics’s infringement of several patents related to improvements in data processing.
The jury in Marshall, Texas determined after a six-day trial that Samsung’s “memory modules” for high-performance computing willfully infringed all five patents that Netlist accused the Korean tech giant of violating.
Representatives for the companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Netlist stock was up 21 percent following the verdict on Friday afternoon.
Irvine, California-based Netlist sued Samsung in 2021, alleging Samsung memory products used in cloud-computing servers and other data-intensive technology infringe its patents. Netlist said its innovations increase the power efficiency of memory modules and allow users to “derive useful information from vast amounts of data in a shorter period of time.”
A Netlist attorney told the jury that Samsung took its patented module technology after the companies had collaborated on another project, according to a court transcript.
Netlist had asked the jury for $404 million (roughly Rs. 3,300 crore) in damages.
Samsung had argued that the patents were invalid and that its technology worked in a different way than Netlist’s inventions.
The case is Netlist v. Samsung Electronics, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, No. 2:21-cv-00463.
In another news, it was reported that Samsung Electronics was 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, underscores the growing challenges Google’s $162-billion (roughly Rs. 13,29,477 crore) a-year search engine business face from Bing — a minor player that has risen in prominence recently after the integration of the artificial intelligence tech behind ChatGPT.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
