Former Samsung Patent Executive Files Patent Lawsuit Against 'Home' Samsung

Samsung Electronics achieved a record high performance with annual sales exceeding 279 trillion won. Samsung Electronics announced on the 7th that, based on its preliminary consolidated results for last year, it recorded sales of 279.04 trillion won and an operating profit of 51.57 trillion won. The photo shows the Samsung Electronics Seocho building. Photo by Mun Honam munonam@

[Asia Economy Reporter Dongwoo Lee] Samsung Electronics has been sued by a former patent executive over smartphone voice recognition technology.

According to industry sources on the 9th, Ahn Seung-ho, former head of Samsung Electronics' IP Center (Vice President), recently filed a complaint in the U.S. Eastern District Court of Texas claiming that Samsung Electronics and Samsung Electronics America willfully infringed on 10 patents. He is seeking damages through Synergy IP, a patent corporation he established in June last year.

The co-plaintiff in this lawsuit includes Staten Tekiya LLC, based in Delaware, USA, which owns the disputed patents.

Synergy IP is known to have been authorized by Staten to handle matters related to the lawsuit.

The patents claimed to have been infringed without permission include 10 patents mainly related to wireless earphones and voice recognition technologies, such as the "Always-On Headwear Recording System" and "Audio Recording Device." These technologies are reported to be incorporated in Samsung Electronics' Galaxy S20 series and others.

The industry estimates the scale of the lawsuit to be in the hundreds of billions of Korean won.

Former Vice President Ahn is an engineer-turned-U.S. patent attorney who has been in charge of Samsung Electronics' patent affairs since 1997.

He was appointed head of the IP Center in 2010 and led the company's IP operations until his retirement in 2019. In 2011, he led the litigation against Apple and also spearheaded cross-license agreements with Google.

Samsung Electronics has not released an official statement regarding this lawsuit.

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