Philips Sues TCL Over TV Streaming Protection, Backlight Patents

Chinese manufacturer TCL Corp.‘s 4K televisions, including its popular Roku Smart LED TVs, allegedly infringe three patents owned by Koninklijke Philips NV, according to a complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles federal court.

Philips owns U.S. Patent Nos. 9,590,977 and 10,298,564, covering technology used in the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection copy protection standard. The patents specifically cover technology related to a “locality check” used to authenticate the content. Philips says TCL televisions infringe by “including functionality that supports technology for streaming multimedia between devices, including hardware and software that perform secure, authenticated distance measurements.”

Philips also alleged that ...