LG Electronics has been ordered to pay damages to Maryland-based Constellation Designs by a federal jury in Marshall, Texas. The jury found LG guilty of patent infringement related to NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) technology. The trial, presided over by U.S. District Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap, lasted for five days. The jury unanimously determined that LG infringed on four patents and that the asserted claims were valid. The damages included a reasonable royalty of $1,684,469, covering the infringing technology as well as damages for Realtek chips.
The lawsuit, filed in 2021, targeted LG Electronics’ popular OLED televisions, claiming that they infringed on four patents owned by Constellation Designs. LG contested the allegations, asserting that the patents were either anticipated or obvious by prior art. However, the jury ruled that the patents were valid and that LG was liable for patent infringement.
During the trial, LG’s expert witness argued against the infringement claims, stating that LG’s TVs did not infringe for several reasons, including the absence of certain features required by the A/322 standard and the inability to receive ATSC 3.0 broadcast signals.
The lawsuit accused LG of selling or offering for sale products within the United States that utilized Constellation Designs’ patented technology. The infringing products included receivers configured to utilize non-uniform parallel decode capacity optimized constellations, non-uniform multidimensional constellation and code rate pairs, and unequally spaced constellations, among others.
