TiVo Patent Suit Against Samsung Shows ‘Breadth and Value’ of Our IP Portfolio, CEO Says
TiVo filed a patent infringement suit against Samsung “because Samsung has used TiVo's intellectual property without our permission in several of its products, including millions of Samsung mobile devices as well as its DVR set-top box,” TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said on an earnings call. The complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, alleged infringement of four TiVo patents. Samsung didn’t comment.
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Two of the patents (6,233,389 and 6,792,195) cited in the Samsung complaint previously have been litigated in the same court against other companies, Rogers said Tuesday. The other two patents in the Samsung complaint (7,558,472 and 8,457,476) are new to TiVo patent litigation but “have expiration dates a number of years further into the future,” Rogers said. TiVo has landed more than $1.6 billion in “awards and payments” from AT&T, Cisco, EchoStar, Motorola Mobility and Verizon by having “enforced its patent rights” in the Marshall federal court, the complaint said.
TiVo’s action against Samsung “should help address one of the questions we have heard from investors over the past several quarters regarding the value and applicability of TiVo's IP portfolio” beyond the 6,233,389 patent, Rogers said. “This should help illustrate the breadth and value of our intellectual property and its fundamental role in a variety of multimedia applications.”
TiVo has “a solid track record of recovering significant damages for infringement of our patents, and given the much larger volume on mobile device shipments, the aggregate damages on mobile devices potentially could be even more substantial than on DVRs,” said General Counsel Matt Zinn in Q&A. TiVo doesn’t take patent infringement lawsuits “lightly,” he said. “We look at all the factors here, whether this is something that we should pursue or not, but we think there's substantial unlicensed activity going on and we've reached the point where we feel we need to do something about it.”
Zinn sidestepped a question on what specifically sparked TiVo to act against Samsung, and why now. “Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can say in terms of our thinking and timing,” Zinn said. “We've in the past said that we would litigate if necessary, and obviously we've determined that it's necessary to litigate with Samsung at this time.”
Rogers also declined to say whether TiVo is targeting other companies for litigation. "There are certainly other companies that we are focused on in terms of licensing our technology, but we're not going to comment beyond that,” he said. “I generally just want to say, because I know we're giving more curt answers to the patent questions than you might like, that ... our focus here is about winning the patent cases, that you know from our past history we are very circumspect about the comments we make during the course of any particular litigation, and that practice has served us very, very well.”
When TiVo has taken other companies to court for violating its patents, “you didn't see us committing a bunch of unforced errors with loose commentary along the way and we plan to continue that approach,” Rogers said. “We're very focused on this particular case. Obviously, we have a broad portfolio of a couple of hundred patents that have average expiration of about 13 years and we have applicability in terms of what we could license to a number of companies."