LG Chem-SK Inno 'Battery Litigation Battle' Sharp Attacks... Escalation into Emotional Conflict

[Asia Economy Reporter Park So-yeon] The 'battery lawsuit battle' between LG Chem and SK Innovation is intensifying into an emotional conflict between the two companies.

Following their statements on the 4th, both companies issued another statement on the 6th, engaging in sharp exchanges over whether SK Innovation's '994 patent' is prior technology of LG Chem or not.

Earlier, LG Chem claimed that the patent in question in SK Innovation's patent infringement lawsuit (the 994 patent) utilized LG Chem's prior technology and requested sanctions from the ITC.

In response, on the 4th, SK Innovation argued that LG Chem monitors competitors' patent developments, and if prior technology had existed, the 994 patent would not have been registered in 2015.

On the 6th, LG Chem rebutted this by stating, "When registering patents for developed technologies, we consider strict criteria such as whether the technology possesses core elements."

They explained that according to their internal standards at the time, the technology did not have features worthy of patent registration and protection, and since it was embedded in customer products and publicly disclosed, they judged there was no risk of patent disputes.

They added, "Unfortunately, we monitor the competitor's level and the quality of the filed patents," thereby belittling the patents registered by SK Innovation.

Regarding SK Innovation's criticism that "issues are raised only after the lawsuit process has progressed significantly," LG Chem claimed, "We identified it as our prior technology immediately after it was raised and have been responding accordingly."

They further pointed out, "SK must first clarify why they had our materials that correspond to prior technology and why they tried to destroy them."

SK Innovation promptly issued a counter-rebuttal on the same day. From SK Innovation's perspective, there is no reason to file a patent that would be invalidated while knowing about prior technology.

SK Innovation criticized, "LG has become so focused on defaming SK rather than debating the patent itself that they have reached the point of making unreasonable claims." They continued, "We have tried to understand as a party in the lawsuit that LG Chem might make various claims to attack SK Innovation's patents and evade their own responsibility for patent infringement during the litigation process. However, seeing LG spread claims that clearly contradict the actual process as if they were proven facts outside the legal framework, we judged that mere patience is no longer sufficient to protect the company's honor," systematically refuting LG's claims.

Regarding the documents LG Chem cited as evidence, SK Innovation explained, "They contain no patent-related information at all," and "LG only presented the document titles to imply something was there."

Additionally, they added that although the inventor of the 994 patent did leave LG, he did so in 2008, five years before LG Chem released the related product in 2013, making LG's claim chronologically unreasonable.

They also argued that the files LG claims were deleted and then restored were preserved, and that the temporary files in the system were simply automatically deleted.

SK Innovation said, "Please clearly present the evidence," and added, "If not, this kind of baseless lawsuit and unreasonable claims are not only difficult for SK but also very burdensome for the public."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.