Huawei slapped with a $10 million lawsuit over patent infringement

Although Huawei smartphones barely available in the US market, that didn't stop a Texas jury from booking the company for patent infringement. The lawsuit was related to 4G LTE technology, via World IP Review.

PanOptics who owns the LTE patents in question - claims that it has tried to come to an agreement with Huawei over the infringement for over two years. The jury agreed that Huawei should pay $10.5 million to PanOptis for the violations. Huawei is yet to respond to the ruling, but it's likely that the Chinese firm will appeal.

PanOptics has several patents that are related to LTE technology, specifically systems that work to decode picture and audio data. PanOptics claims that Huawei devices including the Nexus 6P, used these patents without paying the licensing fees. The patent numbers in question are 7,769,238; 6,604,216; 7,940,851; 8,385,284 and 8,208,569.

Surprisingly, the patents are also involved in the older Huawei smartphones like the Mate 9 and P8 Lite which barely had a presence in America at all compared to the Nexus 6P.

This isn't the first time Huawei has faced issues in America. Previously, the company's plan of collaborating with AT&T was thwarted partially by the United States government.

Speaking of controversy, Huawei was caught false promoting its Nova 3i smartphone. Huawei has been caught pulling off another act of deception, all thanks to the goof-up from the actress involved in the advertisement. Earlier, Huawei was found cheating with the fake P9 camera samples after the EXIF data was retained by a Google+ post. However, here there was no need for any EXIS data because an actual image of the camera sample being taken by a DSLR instead of Nova 3 came into light.

The Instagram picture posted by Sarah Elshamy, the actress featured in this Huawei Mobile Egypt marketing campaign, has been since-deleted. In one of the many pictures posted by her, the man can be seen stretching his arm in a selfie position. However, instead of the Nova 3, there's a DSLR camera on a tripod placed to mimic the position of a phone.

There are at least three other such instances in the ad where the man takes a selfie, and it'd be surprising if a DSLR wasn't used for all those shots. It's a known fact that a lot of editing goes in the aftermath of an advertisement. There's a possibility that all the OEMs use such tricks to promote their products, but only Huawei in unlucky enough to be caught.