Fed up with patent trolls, Samsung goes on an offensive

Getting sued by every patent troll under the capitalist sun kind of goes with the territory when you’re an international conglomerate innovating across dozens of industries. Be that as it may, it would appear Samsung’s tolerance for such low-effort extortion attempts from the so-called “non-practicing entities” has finally reached its tipping point. As the company is now moving on an offensive against two such bad-faith actors, South Korean media reported Thursday.

What’s more, Samsung employed quite an aggressive legal strategy in the creation of its countersuit against one Longhorn IP and an affiliated firm called Trenchant Blade Technologies.

Samsung intends to send a message with this pushback

More specifically, the litigation it instigated in the Northern District of California last Friday has been framed in a way that should set a number of precedents meant to disintegrate a wide variety of patent trolling avenues, including the ones employed by the aforementioned duo. Within the scope of the United States and its common law framework, naturally.

The development was reportedly prompted by a letter from Trenchant in which the company admitted to infringing on Samsung-owned semiconductor tech. While that is just one case out of more than 200 apparent instances of patent-trolling filed against Samsung since 2012 (as documented by KIPRIS), Korean media reports Samsung intends to send a message with this pushback because such bad actors have been multiplying in recent months. Particularly when it comes to chipmaking IP, a highly convoluted field even before accounting for malicious actors trying to abuse a given legal system