EU Patent Court rules billions of euros worth of products destroyed due to counterfeit LEDs

On October 10, 2024, the European Union Patent Court in Düsseldorf ruled in favor of Seoul Semiconductor and its subsidiary in a major patent infringement claim by retailers Expert e-Commerce and Expert Klein. The defendants were found to have infringed Seoul Semiconductor’s European patent EP 3 926 698 B1, which covers WICOP LED technology. This will result in billions of euros worth of LED products being withdrawn from the EU.

Image source: Seoul Semiconductor

The South Korean company Seoul Semiconductor says that for the past two decades every year it has been investing at least 10% of its revenue or $100 million per year in development. This has enabled it to create the most advanced technologies for producing high-performance LEDs, from discrete to integrated, including LED displays. The company owns 18 thousand patents in this area.

The most advanced development of Seoul Semiconductor today remains the production technology of packageless LEDs with integrated electrodes – WICOP. Such LEDs can be used as discrete ones, for example, in smartphone flashes or in car headlights, or, with slight modification, they can be used in displays with a density of up to 2000 dpi. The company states that unscrupulous competitors use WICOP technology to produce their own products and call these types of packaging COB, MIP, CSP.

Since 2018, Seoul Semiconductor has systematically begun to win patent courts in Europe against competitors and, first of all, against the Taiwanese company Everlight Electronics, one of the top five leaders in this sector. In August 2024, the Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) rejected Everlight’s claim to invalidate Seoul Semiconductor’s wireless LED technology patent (WICOP). This decision once again confirmed the reliability of Seoul Semiconductor’s patent portfolios, registered in 18 European countries.

An October ruling by the European Union Patent Court (which was created just a year ago) put an end to the long-running dispute. Germany’s largest online retailer with a turnover of up to $14 billion a year, Expert e-Commerce, was ordered not only to stop selling products that violate Seoul Semiconductor patents, but also to confiscate and destroy all unsold items.

There is no specifying list of products subject to destruction. First of all, we are talking about flashes for smartphones. However, all lighting products from garlands to floodlights and car brake lights, as well as LED displays, are potentially covered by the ban. The volume of destruction of products can exceed all imaginable scales. So far, this order is in force in eight European countries – Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden, but could potentially be extended to others.