Seoul Semiconductor sues Amazon Europe for LED patent infringement

South Korea’s Seoul Semiconductor Co. said on Tuesday it had filed a complaint against multinational commerce giant Amazon with the European Union’s Unified Patent Court (UPC), seeking an injunction against the sale of its patented products.

Seoul Semiconductor, the world’s third-largest light-emitting diode (LED) display maker, said in a statement that it had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Amazon’s European unit, Amazon Services Europe, with the UPC, seeking a blanket ban on the distribution of its products across 17 European countries.

Amazon officials weren’t immediately available for comment.

The complaint concerns Seoul Semiconductor’s two patented technologies – one related to “a revolutionary technology” that freely adjusts the brightness and color of LED lighting products over time, a technology widely used in smart lighting products and color-tunable lighting, and the other on heat dissipation in LED packages, a crucial technology used in automotive lighting.

“Despite an emphasis on ESG management, some large LED companies are merely distributing (patent) infringing products with little respect for intellectual property. It hurts us all,” Park Han-seon, executive vice president of Seoul Semiconductor’s marketing department, said in the statement.

BLANKET BAN ACROSS EUROPE

Seoul Semiconductor said it and its affiliates have obtained 15 permanent court injunctions over patent infringement against manufacturers and distributors in the US, Germany, France and the Netherlands over the past five years.

Filing lawsuits in individual countries, however, was found to be less efficient in enforcing patents against perpetrators, it said.

This time, the company is taking its case to the UPC to prevent the distribution of the infringed products throughout Europe with a single lawsuit, it said.

The UPC is a common patent court of 17 countries of the European Union, which opened in June 2023.

The UPC hears cases regarding infringement and revocation proceedings and a single court ruling is directly applicable to member states that have ratified the UPC agreement.

NEVER BEEN DEFEATED IN PATENT DISPUTES

Listed on Korea’s Kosdaq stock market, Seoul Semiconductor is known for its undefeated streak of legal battles over patent infringement cases.

It has won about 100 suits against various companies since 2003, including Philips, German retailer Conrad Electronic, Dutch trading company FTHMM International B.V., Luminus Devices Inc., Lite-On Inc. and German electronic parts seller Mouser Electronics Inc.

With LED displays widely adopted into applications, Seoul Semiconductor has grappled with patent litigation over a broader range of consumer products.

Founded in 1992, it has poured more than 1 trillion won ($749 million) into R&D. Seoul Semiconductor and its subsidiaries, including Seoul Viosys Co. and Sensor Electronic Technology Inc. (SETi), own more than 18,000 patents.

Among Seoul Semiconductor’s patented technologies, many of which are the world’s first, Violeds, an ultraviolet clean technology, is increasingly used by global home appliance brands in refrigerators, air conditioners and washers as the tech sterilizes water or other liquids.

Another notable technology is the WICOP LED, a package-free LED that directly connects semiconductors to a printed circuit board without a substrate installed between them. It is now a core technology for small-sized gadgets such as the Mini-LED TV.

The company’s other patented technologies include Acrich, a high-voltage AC-driven LED; nPola, an LED with 10 times the output of a conventional LED; filament LED, an all-direction light emitting technology; SunLike, a natural sun spectrum LED.

Last April, Seoul Semiconductor said its SunLike LED was adopted by Volvo for interior lighting at the European carmaker’s EX90 SUV and the Polestar 3 EV.

Write to Ji-Hye Min at spop@hankyung.com


In-Soo Nam edited this article.