Huawei to pay PanOptis $10.5m for patent infringement

A Texas jury has found that Huawei Technologies and its subsidiary Huawei Device USA infringed five of PanOptis Patent Management’s standard-essential patents.

The jury at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which announced its decision on Monday, August 27, ordered Huawei to pay PanOptis $10.5 million.

PanOptis, alongside its subsidiary Optis Wireless Technology, filed a patent infringement complaint at the district court in October 2017. It alleged that Huawei had infringed US patent numbers 7,769,238; 6,604,216; 7,940,851; 8,385,284 and 8,208,569.

The ‘long term evolution’ (LTE)-essential patents relate to telecommunications systems and technology that decode picture and audio data.

LTE standards are part of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, which produces globally applicable technical specifications for mobile systems.

According to the claim, Huawei required a licence to PanOptis’s LTE essential patents because Huawei makes products, such as mobile phones, that operate in compliance with LTE standards. As a result, Huawei’s products infringed the LTE-essential patents.

PanOptis said that it met with Huawei at least ten times between 2014 and 2016 to discuss PanOptis’s LTE-essential patents. According to the claim, PanOptis presented Huawei with fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms to license the patents.

These meetings were followed up with a letter that PanOptis sent to Huawei emphasising its willingness to license its patents on FRAND terms.

However, PanOptis claimed that Huawei did not reciprocate the company’s good-faith efforts and instead “resisted taking a licence to PanOptis’s valuable IP”, said the complaint.

Huawei’s products that allegedly infringed the patents included the Huawei Nexus 6P, Huawei Mate 9 and Huawei P8 Lite.

On Monday, the Texas jury supported PanOptis’s patent infringement allegations and found that Huawei had wilfully infringed all five of the patents in question.

The jury ordered Huawei to pay PanOptis the sum of $10.5 million for the wilful infringement.