Wednesday, December 18, 2013

LG Settles Litigation against Touchscreen’s Gesture Patents

Case Filed: Jul 25, 2013

Case Closed: Dec 13, 2013

Court: California Northern District Court

Judge: William Alsup

Case Summary:

A patent infringement case was filed by Touchscreen Gestures against LG claiming that the latter have violated four patents related to providing functionality through a host of smartphone gestures including dragging, tapping on a display and scrolling. The patents involved are:
  •       US7180506 - Method for identifying a movement of single tap on a touch device, issued on Feb 20, 2007
  •        US7184031 - Method and controller for identifying a drag gesture, issued on Feb 27, 2007
  •        US7190356 - Method and controller for identifying double tap gestures, issued on Mar 13, 2007
  •      US7319457 - Method of scrolling window screen by means of controlling electronic device, issued on Jan 15, 2008

The ‘506, ‘356 and ‘457 patents expire[i] on Feb 12, 2024 and the ‘031 patent expires on Jul 06, 2024. These patents are currently assigned[ii] to Touchscreen Gestures (source: MaxVal’s Assignment Database). The patents were originally issued to Sentelic Corporation, a Taiwan based company, manufacturing products including touch screens, touch pads, and touch buttons for applications in electronic devices. The complaint stated that the patents are ‘directed to novel, unique and non-obvious methods’.
Touchscreen Gestures accused a bunch of LG products such as LG Genesis, Elite, Ignite, myTouch, Vortex smartphones as well as the LG Optimus and G-Slate tablets, which allow the identification of drag, tap and scroll gestures via methods, controllers and gestures units as infringing claims of the ‘031, ‘506, ‘356 and ‘457 patents.

Initially, the case revolved around 4 patents and later an amended complaint was filed asserting the '031, '506 and '356 patents, thus dismissing its assertion the '457 patent. The case was then transferred from Eastern District of Texas to Northern District of California. Later, the parties agreed to resolve the dispute after which LG filed a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice, thereby ending the litigation.

See 3:13-cv-03442 for more details. To get alerts on cases filed/closed, subscribe to our Litigation Alerts.

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[i] Expected expiration date. Patent Term Estimator is a free web-based tool that automatically calculates patent terms and expiration dates for U.S. utility patents.
[ii] MaxVal offers Patent Assignment Alert service where subscribers receive email alerts when assignments relating to target applications, patents or entities of interest are recorded.

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