Alphonso Inc., recently rebranded as LG Ads, has successfully won a patent dispute with the developer of a content recommendation engine and viewer tracking application designed for Smart TVs regarding the use of television audience data for targeting viewers on digital devices.
It concludes 5 1/2 years of litigation, including a December 2018 Federal District Court ruling in Alphonso’s favor.
The legal tussle involves San Francisco-based Samba TV.
In November 2015, it filed suit against Alphonso under the guise that Alphonso infringed upon Samba’s patent for “Targeting with Television Audience Data Across Multiple Screens.”
The December 2018 ruling in the United States District Court for Northern District of California ruled that Alphonso did not infringe on this patent.
It was then appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This judicial body determined that the case should have been dismissed before ever reaching the infringement arguments, Alphonso said late Tuesday (5/11).
Why? As the appeals court sees it, the Samba patent is invalid.
“With these decisions, our innovative practices for audience-data-driven TV retargeting have been validated across the board, just as we anticipated,” hailed Alphonso CEO Ashish Chordia. “We are pleased that the District Court agreed that we did not infringe on any patents. And we appreciate the Federal Circuit’s careful analysis invalidating Samba’s patent altogether.”
— RBR+TVBR West Coast Bureau, in Eureka, Calif.
