If you look up the phrase "patent infringement" on Google News, you will see pages upon pages of news stories that discuss two companies pitted against one another in a lawsuit. For this post, we're looking at a messy patent infringement case between two technology companies -- NVIDIA and Samsung. It began with NVIDIA suing Samsung for infringing on their graphics card technology back in Sept. 2014.

That case led to a countersuit by Samsung against NVIDIA. The case has proceeded since then, with multiple interpretations yielding contradictory results. At first, NVIDIA was seemingly justified in its claims, but a later ruling gave Samsung the upper ground. 

However, in a federal jury trial, it appears that NVIDIA has finally been vindicated. The ruling, in that case, cleared NVIDIA of any wrongdoing. Four patents were in question at the beginning of the case, but it was reduced to just one by the end. A combination of mistrials and an optional drop of one of the patent disputes by Samsung led to the case being about only one patent.

So what can we learn from this case? Well, there are a couple of things -- first, it is very easy for a patent infringement case to become messy. It is not uncommon for the party originally sued for patent infringement to file a countersuit. With this in mind, the second lesson is that businesses need capable and experienced legal representation on their side to make sense of these often messy and complicated lawsuits.

Source: Slash Gear, "NVIDIA cleared of Samsung's patent infringement suit," JC Torres, Feb. 8, 2016

The author's opinions expressed in this article are strictly his/her own and should not be attributed to any others, including other attorneys at Klein DeNatale Goldner or the law firm as a whole.