Chinese computer Company Lenovo has been hit with a major patent claim by a group of Companies that include Samsung, GE and Thomson Electronics.
In what could be one of the highest-stakes patent fights of the year the Companies have lodged a complaint in Manhattan federal district court against Lenovo Group Limited. The litigants are represented by Sullivan & Cromwell partner Garrard Beeney.
Beeney’s clients claim that Lenovo knowingly violated their patent on a type of compression technology called MPEG-2, which is used in everything from DVDs to satellite television. (MPEG-2 compresses data into a more manageable form.
Without it, an analog movie converted to DVD, for instance, would require dozens of disks.) The complaint notes that Lenovo’s competitors, such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Sony, have licensed the technology, while Lenovo–which has a 40 percent market share in China and about 25 percent in the United States has failed to take out any licenses.
Solicitors for the plaintiffs claim that they are seeking “eye-popping damages”.
