The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has decided to open an investigation based on a patent infringement complaint filed by patent aggregator VideoLabs against four major PC makers, Tom’s Hardware reports.
The plaintiffs, VideoLabs, have asked the ITC to issue a limited exclusion order and cease and desist order prohibiting the import of some devices from Acer, Asus, MSI, Motorola Mobility and Lenovo into the United States.
VideoLabs alleges that personal computers (and other devices) manufactured by Acer, Asus, MSI, Motorola Mobility (a Lenovo company), and Lenovo that have certain GPUs with video processing capabilities infringe four of its patents. If the devices are found to infringe VideoLabs’ patents, they will be banned in the United States.
The three U.S. patents in question – 7,769,238, 8,139,878, and 8,208,542 – reportedly cover video encoding methods developed by Panasonic in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, a fourth patent, 7,372,452, describes a method for automatically adjusting video playback on portable devices based on the rotation direction of the screen and was originally granted to Samsung in the early 2000s.
These patents can be applied to virtually all modern devices with video processing and display capabilities, including personal computers, media players, smartphones, tablets, and even televisions.
Acer, Asus, MSI, Motorola Mobility and Lenovo have not yet commented on the ITC’s investigation.
VideoLabs was founded in 2018 to focus on hoarding patents in the video processing category. Since its inception, the company has acquired hundreds of patents from numerous holders and licensed them to a number of companies, including Disney, and two Fortune 100 companies. In the last 18 months or so, VideoLabs has also filed patent infringement complaints against Amazon, Dell, Meta and Netflix.
