South Korea’s light-emitting diode (LED) producer Seoul Semiconductor Co. filed a lawsuit against U.S.-based retail giant Kmart Corp. in a California court for selling products illegally manufactured with its patented technologies, the company said on Sunday.

Seoul Semiconductor argued that some LED products sold at Kmart infringed its eight patented core technologies including high color rendering index (CRI), phosphor combination, LED epi growth and chip fabrication, omni-directional light, and acrich multi-junction technology.

The patents include LED-related inventions by 2014 Nobel laureate in physics Shuji Nakamura and his colleague Steven Denbaars, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The infringed items also included the LED filament bulb, which looks like the old-fashioned incandescent bulb.

The lawsuit is aimed to raise awareness to retailers on discretion in selling patented products, a company official said.

The company has hired Lawrence Gotts from a law firm Latham & Watkins as a lead attorney, who also helped it win a patent battle against Japan-based liquid crystal display (LCD) manufacturer Enplas Display Device Corp. in March this year. He is renowned for IP and patent litigations, selected several times as one of the top patent lawyers by Chambers Global 2016 and Legal 500, global law firms and lawyers ranking providers.

Seoul Semiconductor has so far won all 50 or more patent lawsuits it engaged since the first one in 2003 against Taiwanese AOT. In 2014, it won patent battles against two TV manufacturers in North America Curtis and Craig Electronics, and it also achieved a victory in a patent suit against Japanese lens maker Enplas and received $4 million in damages this year.

Its subsidiary Seoul Viosys Co. also won a patent lawsuit against U.S.-based ultraviolet (UV) LED product maker Salon Supply this year. Last month, it filed a suit against a U.S. firm for illegally using its patented technology to produce UV LED mosquito traps that are 13 times more efficient than other traps and supplied to some South East Asian countries hit by Zika virus.

“We will aggressively sue companies who have breached our patented technologies and fight hard until the end,” said Nam Ki-beom from Seoul Semiconductor.

By Kim Je-gwan

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