As many concerned observers have warned for number of years (us included), China is becoming a haven for patent trolls. It has become friendly towards software patents and mass litigation (the EPO imitates this, whereas the USPTO goes in the opposite direction, which helps explain the surge of patent trolls in Europe -- even before a UPC-like regime -- and their demise in the US).
Last November, IAM reported that Samsung Electronics, already locked in a high-stakes litigation battle with Huawei, was also facing multiple NPE suits in Chinese courts. One of the NPE plaintiffs was Shenzhen Dunjun Technology, and it was asserting a patent originally assigned to none other than Huawei. A search of Chinese court rulings reveals that this suit was not necessarily a one-off connected to the Samsung-Huawei dispute. Dunjun’s assertions go back several years, and include very large companies, both foreign and domestic.
According to an article published in the Chinese media, Dunjun is a licensing company set up in 2014, whose executive team includes former employees of Huawei, Foxconn and other technology companies with a major presence in the Shenzhen area. The assignments record shows that the company acquired several patents from Huawei during the summer of 2015. Beyond that transaction it is unclear whether Dunjun has any kind of ongoing relationship with Huawei.
Via Licensing, the leading provider of intellectual property solutions, announced today that it is launching a new multi-generational licensing program for wireless technologies. The program offers one of the largest combined cellular standard-essential patent portfolios for licensing connected devices, including smartphones, tablet computers, connected motor vehicles and other IoT devices.