Samsung Patent Licensing Agreement with Personalized Media Communications

Texas-based Personalized Media communications, which is having a seminal intellectual property portfolio, has successfully signed a patent licensing agreement with Samsung Corporation and its affiliates.

PMC patent portfolio includes around 100 issued patents and pending applications that cover the use of control and information signals to control automated systems for generating and delivering electronic content to a display that is relevant to a user. Over the years, PMC is consistently pursuing a license-first approach to commercializing its intellectual property.

In November 2015 PMC filed suit against Samsung in the Eastern District of Texas, claiming the electronics maker had infringed patents related to signal processing. Specifically targeting Samsung digital televisions and its Android smartphones. In its complaint, PMC said it had months of discussions in the year 2014-15 about potential license but failed to reach a deal.

Samsung denied infringement and sought a judgment that the patents were invalid. Samsung said the patents arose from technology that dated back to the 1980’s and now PMC was “stretching its patents to cover modern-day smartphones and TVs, devices and technologies that were science fiction at the time of PMC’s purportedly inventive work.” But Samsung failed to prove the claims it had made.

Later, Samsung filed a series of petitions seeking Patent Trial and Appeal Board review of the patents. PTAB petition and district court case ended after the two sides reached an agreement.

With this licensing agreement, Samsung joins other like Sony, Panasonic, Cisco, DirecTV etc., who also have taken PMC patent license.

About the Author: Gaurav Giri, Sr. Executive Licensing at IIPRD and can be reached at: [email protected]