Samsung sues Oura to stop Oura from suing Samsung over the Galaxy Ring

Samsung has filed a complaint against Oura in an attempt to avoid intellectual property disputes in the run-up to the launch of the Galaxy Ring. The suit says Oura used its patent portfolio to sue smaller competitors in wearable technology and suggested it might do the same against much larger Samsung. Welcome to the strange modern world of mega-corporations suing startups to prevent them from filing their own lawsuits.

“Oura’s actions and public statements demonstrate that Oura will continue to assert patent infringement against other entrants to the U.S. smart ring market, including Samsung,” the lawsuit said, first. reported on by The edge, bed. “Oura’s immediate response to the Galaxy Ring announcement was to highlight the purported strength of its intellectual property portfolio.”

The lawsuit claims that the Galaxy Ring does not infringe Oura’s patents. However, to justify his suit, he presents a model of what he sees as aggressive intellectual property protection on the part of the Finnish startup. It lists instances in which Oura pursued smaller competitors like Ultrahuman, Circular and RingConn “as soon as, or even before, they entered the U.S. market.”

The document also cites that Oura embarked on a media tour immediately after the Galaxy Ring announcement, touting the company’s “more than 150 patents.” It specifically mentions patent-related citations published by TechCrunch and one CNBC interview where Oura CEO Tom Hale suggests the company can use its IP wallet against Samsung.

Samsung’s legal filing essentially attempts to portray Oura as a patent troll, claiming that many of the Finnish company’s patent disputes involved features common to the entire smart ring category, such as electronics, sensors, a battery and scores that weigh on health parameters. This approach evokes the old patent conflicts between Samsung and Apple. A common theme in these decade-old court battles was that Samsung accused the iPhone maker of holding bogus patents that should never have been granted because they used obvious technologies or methods shared by the entire industry. sector. (It worked with mixed results in these cases.)

Samsung filed its new complaint against Oura in the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division. Oura is based in Finland but has a US branch of its operations based in Delaware, including offices in San Francisco and with more than 50 employees.

The lawsuit reveals additional details about Samsung’s Galaxy Ring, which the company first showed off in a render in January before revealing physical models at Mobile World Congress in February. The document states that Samsung only finalized the Galaxy Ring design in “mid-May 2024” and plans to enter mass production in mid-June.

He adds that the Galaxy Ring will arrive in the United States “around August of this year,” which matches expectations that the company would launch it at a summer Unpacked event.