The complaint asserts that Feit lighting products infringe twelve LED patents, and seeks a permanent injunction against the sales of those products.
Seoul Semiconductor (“Seoul”) has already secured permanent injunctions against several retailers selling Feit products in the Eastern District of Texas in 2019 and the Central District of California in 2020.
However, the distribution of suspected infringing products has continued. For that reason, in 2022, Seoul filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Ace Hardware, another distributor of Feit, as well as a patent infringement lawsuit directly against Feit, to cut off the distribution of products believed to be infringing Seoul’s patents.
Seoul has a history of continually pursuing companies that infringe its patents. Everlight Electronics (“Everlight”), a Taiwanese LED package maker, is the world’s eighth biggest LED maker. Based on Seoul’s enforcement, the German District Court of Düsseldorf ordered multiple permanent injunctions and a recall of Everlight’s LED products in 2018-19. In June 2022, Suwon District Court in Korea found Everlight guilty of criminal misappropriation of Seoul’s trade secrets and industry technology, awarding the maximum criminal fines.
Seoul triumphed in six-year litigation against Enplas Corporation, the largest backlight unit (BLU) lens maker, when the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Enplas willfully infringed Seoul’s LED patent, and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Seoul’s victory in 2019. Civil damages by Enplas are still pending in another litigation.
“There are unethical companies that do not respect intellectual properties despite emphasizing corporate responsibility, such as ESG,” said an official at Seoul. “Intellectual property rights are necessary to respect in order to create fair competition in the market.”
About Seoul Semiconductor
Seoul Semiconductor is the world’s second-largest global LED manufacturer, a ranking excluding the captive market, and has more than 18,000 patents. Based on a differentiated product portfolio, Seoul offers a wide range of technologies, and mass produces innovative LED products for indoor and outdoor lighting, automotive, IT products, such as mobile phones, computer displays, and other applications, as well as the UV area. The company’s world’s first development and mass production products are becoming the LED industry standard and leading the global market with a package-free LED, WICOP; a high-voltage AC-driven LED, Acrich; an LED with 10X the output of a conventional LED, nPola; a cutting edge ultraviolet clean technology LED, Violeds; an all direction light emitting technology, filament LED; a natural sun spectrum LED, SunLike; and more. For more information, please visit www.seoulsemicon.com/en.
