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 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 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. © Reuters