Samsung Faces Allegation from NuCurrent for Stealing the Wireless Charging Technology

Shivam Singhal
Mar 27, 2018
3 min read

The South Korean based company which tops the chart of bestselling smartphones in the

world is sued again for it's unethical activity as confirmed by NuCurrent a company based in Chicago which provides wireless charging technology to various companies. Back in 2012 Apple also sued Samsung on the basis of the patent issue and the list goes on and on.

Presently Samsung is facing the allegation from NuCurrent for stealing the wireless charging technology. NuCurrent wanted to discuss over the licensing of the technology to the company so they were invited in 2015 to South Korea for further discussions regarding the benefits of this technology if they will use that in their smartphone. The meeting was considered a success as Samsung made up their mind to use this technology in their Galaxy S and Galaxy Note phones.

There was no official deal signed as such but they signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement. NuCurrent eventually got the idea that Samsung wasn't in the mood of signing this deal because the company kept stalling it.

The different models of chargers were introduced consequently:

NuCurrent informed that they have provided Samsung with the sample of two wireless power coils so that their engineers and executives can scrutinize the exclusive designs because Samsung’s design didn’t work as smooth as NuCurrent. They said that over the months Samsung asked for new samples for further study under the confidentiality agreement and in 2016 Samsung’s CTO even visited NuCurrent’s offices in Chicago in order to meet the representatives. Samsung continued this attitude and in May 2016 NuCurrent was even invited to speak at a Samsung conference in Mountain View, California but still the company didn’t make any progress in terms of their partnership and NuCurrent after constant reminders to the company assumed that they have already partnered with someone else and are working on their wireless technology or working exclusively on their wireless charging antenna but as it turns it was actually the opposite. Samsung went ahead with NuCurrent’s intellectual property and in 2016 they have already sold millions of those products without the prior knowledge of the other company.

Guilty or Not?

In 2012 Samsung was sued by Apple and Samsung had too sued Apple for the patent issue but the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Samsung but still, the retrials are going on.
In 2014 it was PARTEQ a non- profit Canadian organization who accused the company of stealing the feature of ‘Smart Pause’ in their videos.
In 2016 TESSERA (semiconductor manufacturing company) sued Samsung for allegedly using the technology in spite of the expiry of their license.
In 2017 the company got into a conflict over the Samsung Gear VR provided by Oculus which was printed on the box, now the problem was that Oculus was sued by a company called ZeniMax which had developed the portion of the technology and used in the headset and Samsung still chose to use it even though they knew.

All of us will be considering this thought that okay, companies stealing ideas, or patent

technologies conflicts are not something that is new. Even Apple is also involved in these types of things not directly but somehow in any other word, it will be called stealing someone’s idea because somebody put a lot of labor and thought and then the idea came into existence but just because there was not any latest technology available at that time it was not implemented.

But after same years same ideas could be transformed into reality because the updated technology was available. To top it all, somewhere every other company has extracted the idea from someone else and there’s no copyright on a single idea otherwise just imagine what mayhem would have been created by now.

Currently, Samsung seems to be a lawsuit firm rather than a smartphone manufacturer because every year they are accused of stealing a piece of tech, and still they find their way somehow because of their strong legal team which very well know that what they have done and how they will save themselves by paying the penalty.

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