Lidl vs. Tesco - Netlist vs. Samsung

Lidl wins trademark lawsuit against Tesco

On Wednesday 18^th April, the German supermarket chain Lidl won a trade mark case against the British retailer Tesco in the High Court in London. The case was based on the fact that Tesco started using a yellow circle on a blue square background, which is very similar to the Lidl logo.

In 2020, Lidl sued Tesco after Tesco began using a yellow circle on a blue background to promote its “Clubcard prices” discount scheme, inside its stores as well as more generally when promoting the scheme.

According to the ruling, Tesco has “taken unfair advantage of the distinctive reputation” that Lidl’s trade mark enjoys on the discount / low prices market. The judge added that Tesco’s intention was “copying with a view to enhancing the value perception of Tesco’s own Clubcard Prices offering by adopting a getup, in the form of a blue background and yellow circle, which already had a proven association with a strong value proposition (Lidl logo) in the minds of consumers”.

In a statement, Lidl representatives stressed that “over the last three years, Tesco has been using its Clubcard logo to deceive many customers into believing that Tesco was price matching against Lidl or was able to offer the same value as us”. Lidl also highlighted that they tried to resolve this matter out of court first, to no avail.

Tesco said it intended to appeal the decision and that the “Clubcard Prices” loyalty programme will remain unchanged.

Netlist wins a computer-memory patent lawsuit against Samsung

Last Friday, April 21, computer-memory company Netlist succeeded in proving to a Texas federal jury that Samsung had infringed several of its patents relating to data processing improvements, and was awarded more than $303 million for the infringements.

In 2021, Netlist sued Samsung for using memory chips in cloud computing servers and other data-intensive technologies, alleging that those memory chips infringed five of its patents.

According to Netlist, its innovations increase the efficiency of memory modules, enabling users to “derive useful information from vast amounts of data in a shorter period of time”.

During the trial, a lawyer for Netlist told the jury that Samsung had taken advantage of the fact that the two companies had worked together on another project to copy its patented module technology.

On the other hand, Samsung disagreed and claimed that its technology worked in a different way to Netlist’s, and that the infringed patents were invalid.

After a six-day trial, the jury found that Samsung’s high-performance computing memory modules infringed all five of Netlist’s patents.