Affinity Labs of Texas, located in Texas, US, broke its 2-year-long silence, and returned as a patent troll (NPE) threatening the global IT and automotive industry. Having sued LG Electronics once in 2012, Affinity Labs filed two patent lawsuits respectively against LG Electronics and LG Electronics Mobilecomm (LGE’s US subsidiary) twice last June. In less than 2 weeks (June 11 and 26), this NPE brought a total of 4 lawsuits against LG Electronics.
According to the IPnomics report titled “What is LG facing?” published by the Electronic Times Future Technology Research Center (ETRC) and the KwangGaeTo Lab (CEO Kang Min-soo), a patent analysis specialist, Affinity Labs filed a total of 10 lawsuits against major terminal manufacturers last June and July. It brought four lawsuits against Samsung Electronics, and two lawsuits against LG Electronics, Blackberry and HTC respectively. In the same period, Affinity Labs filed additional lawsuits against the US subsidiaries of SEC and LGE.
Founded in 2008, Affinity Labs used 10 or so patents it developed on its own to file over 30 lawsuits using the patents it developed on its own. Affinity Labs adopted the top-down litigation strategy, i.e. attacking market leaders first. Its litigation is all the more powerful.
Confident that it can pressure Apple back in 2009 immediately after its establishment, Affinity Labs sued Apple. After three years of legal battle, Apple chose to settle out of court with Affinity Labs, and purchased the patents used for litigation. After settling with Apple, Affinity Labs is looking for a new attack target. Since last year the company has been trying to beat LGE, SEC, Blackberry and HTC to the punch.
The technology that Affinity Labs used to attack major terminals manufacturers is patents related to ‘Telecommunications.’ Telecommunications is a technology that enables users far away from each other to communicate with each other. Representative technologies are location monitoring and channel allocation. LGE owns more than 1000 patents in the telecommunications sector. LGE has a solid IP portfolio, but the number of lawsuits filed by NPEs against LGE has greatly increased as well. Affinity Labs is also staring at LGE’s telecommunications patents.
