MPEG LA announces settlement with Samsung Electronics

MPEG LA is a global one-stop licensing packaging solution and provider for technology standards and platforms, offering a “many-to-many licensing model” that enables customers to obtain multiple patent rights required for a particular technology standard or platform on a global scale through a single transaction, without the need to negotiate patent licenses individually with patent holders. MPEG LA’s patent pools include QI wireless charging, electric vehicle fast charging, EVS audio codecs, and HEVC, among others.

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According to TechPowerup, MPEG LA has announced that the HEVC enforcement lawsuit filed against Samsung Electronics on March 28, 2022, at the Düsseldorf Regional Court in Germany has been resolved through licensing measures. Consequently, all legal disputes related to these patent enforcement actions have been settled.

As previously reported, MPEG LA accused Samsung Electronics of infringing patents within the HEVC patent portfolio license. These patents are crucial to the HEVC (also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2) digital video encoding standard, used in products for encoding and decoding videos for the internet, television, mobile transmission, reception, and utilization.

MPEG LA asserts that Samsung Electronics and its parent company were licensors and licensees within the HEVC patent portfolio license from the fall of 2014 until March 2020. However, after the relevant license was suspended, Samsung continued to offer products in Germany, including smartphones, tablets, and televisions, which utilized the patent-protected HEVC technology.

It is understood that the HEVC patent pool encompasses over 7,000 patents from 29 companies, including Apple, Canon, Samsung, MediaTek, and Dolby Laboratories. Additionally, over 300 companies have signed on as licensees on the MPEG LA platform.