Davis Polk has been defending SD-3C, a joint venture of Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba, against antitrust and patent misuse claims brought by Samsung. Samsung’s case, filed in federal court in San Francisco, claimed that the creation of the SD Card Flash Memory standard and related patent pool activities harmed consumers and violated the U.S. antitrust laws. The case involves complex and rarely-litigated antitrust aspects of intellectual property and standard-setting activities.

On August 25, 2011, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted our consolidated motions to dismiss Samsung’s suit, holding the state and federal antitrust claims were barred on their face by the statute of limitations, and that Samsung’s patent misuse claims were not legally cognizable. The Court specifically noted that SD-3C’s practice of calculating royalties based on the finished product price is a “widely accepted method for calculating patent royalties.”

The Davis Polk litigation team includes partners Christopher B. Hockett and Neal A. Potischman, associates Rajesh James and Samantha Harper Knox, and legal assistant Felicia Yu. Members of the Davis Polk team are based in the Menlo Park and New York offices.

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