Juli and SigmaTel made a full-scale settlement;the CN-US MP3 patent case comes to an end

August 8, 2007

The multimedia chip provider Juli announced on 21st, June that it had reached a full-scale agreement with its American counterpart SigmaTel, which means that, after three years’ war of litigation, this typical case of patent dispute between Chinese and US companies has come to an agreement with a compromise.

According to the agreement, both parties are going to withdraw all lawsuits against each other as well as their clients, and have reached a common understanding that the two parties should not resort to litigations for any legal conducts arising from any third party’s patent or legal conducts in the next three years. Furthermore, they have reached a cross-license agreement on with respect to all patent rights possessed by each side.

The lawsuit between Juli and SigmaTel started at the beginning of 2005, when SigmaTel lodged a lawsuit to Federal Court in Austin of America, accusing Juli for infringement of its patent rights to the chip of MP3 players. During the litigation period, ITC of America made a decision that Juli infringed two patent rights of SigmaTel, and prohibited Juli from producing the infringing chips and exporting MP3 players with the infringing chips to America. However, Juli stopped producing such chips long before and has marched into the American market with newly-developed series of chips.