Video analytics software developer ObjectVideo announced on Wednesday that it has dropped its request for the United States International Trade Commission to investigate alleged infringements of the company’s patents by surveillance camera maker Samsung.
"Both parties agreed this was the appropriate next step as part of our continued efforts to resolve the dispute between the companies," said ObjectVideo CEO Raul Fernandez in a statement on Wednesday.
In a separate statement issued by Samsung on Friday, however, the surveillance products manufacturer attributed ObjectVideo’s dropping of the investigation to several "setbacks" in their case against them. According to the statement, an administrative law judge last month dismissed the '175 patent (video segmentation using statistical pixel modeling) allegations against Samsung. Additionally, earlier this month, Samsung said that an Office of Unfair Import Investigations’ staff attorney agreed with the company in a court filing that it didn’t infringe on the remaining patents asserted against it.
"We are very happy that the staff attorney and now ObjectVideo has apparently realized what we have been saying all along, that our products do not infringe ObjectVideo’s patents," said a spokesman of Samsung Techwin’s Intellectual Property Department in the statement. "We respect the intellectual property of others, but we do not pay unnecessary license fees simply to avoid litigation. That is why we decided to litigate this case and this outcome vindicates our company principles," he added.
ObjectVideo fired back with their own statement on Friday, saying that Samsung received a "very limited covenant," from its decision to drop the ITC investigation and that the covenant only applied to three of the company’s 47 patents.
"This is a covenant which covers a very small subset of Samsung products as of June 30, 2011. As the case more fully developed, we realized that Samsung actually had very primitive and inaccurate video analytics capabilities," ObjectVideo CEO Raul Fernandez said in the statement. "When Samsung legitimately invents or inevitably finds it is unable to compete with market leaders who have legitimately invented or licensed our IP or our software, we would welcome having additional business discussions."
A spokeswoman for the law firm representing Samsung in the case on Monday said that the company would not comment further on the matter.
ObjectVideo continued its action against Bosch with a public trial last week at the USITC in Washington, D.C.
Last year, ObjectVideo filed lawsuits against Bosch, Sony and Samsung alleging that the companies infringed upon their intellectual property. In February, ObjectVideo reached a patent licensing agreement with Sony and requested that the ITC end its investigation into the matter.
Just last month, ObjectVideo announced that it was also filing an ITC complaint against Pelco for allegedly infringing upon the company’s patents pertaining to video tripwire and metadata.
