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HUAWEI fined $10.5 million in America for 4G LTE patent infringement

HUAWEI is finding itself on the wrong side of the law in America with a recent multi-million dollar fine.
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Published onAugust 31, 2018

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TL;DR
  • A Texas jury just found HUAWEI guilty of infringing on LTE technology patents with some smartphones.
  • The jury found that HUAWEI should pay Texas company PanOptis — the owner of the patents — $10.5 million.
  • HUAWEI has yet to respond to the ruling, but will likely appeal.

Although Huawei smartphones barely have a presence at all in America, that didn’t stop a Texas jury from finding the Chinese company guilty of patent infringement related to 4G LTE technology, via World IP Review.

PanOptis — the Texas company that owns the LTE patents in question — claims that it tried unsuccessfully nearly a dozen times over two years to strike an agreement with HUAWEI over the infringements. The jury agreed that HUAWEI should pay $10.5 million to PanOptis for the violations.

HUAWEI has yet to respond to the ruling, although it’s likely that the company will appeal.

Still doubt HUAWEI? Well, it just became the second biggest smartphone OEM in world
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The HUAWEI P20.

PanOptis owns several patents that relate to LTE technology, specifically systems that work to decode picture and audio data. PanOptis claims that multiple HUAWEI smartphones (including the Nexus 6P, which HUAWEI made in a partnership with Google) used these patents without paying the requisite licensing fees. The patent numbers in question are 7,769,238; 6,604,216; 7,940,851; 8,385,284 and 8,208,569.

Curiously, the patent infringements also involved older HUAWEI products like the HUAWEI Mate 9 and HUAWEI P8 Lite which barely had a presence in America at all compared to the Nexus 6P.

This is not the first time HUAWEI has faced issues in America. Earlier this year, HUAWEI’s big plans of breaking into the U.S. market through a partnership with AT&T were thwarted partially by the United States government. As of now, HUAWEI is keeping quiet about any of its plans to attempt to break into America.

NEXT: HUAWEI slams Australian 5G ban, calls it ‘politically motivated’

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