The French government has accused Samsung of infringing patents it holds covering LCD technology and has summoned the South Korean giant to the portentous-sounding Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance to explain itself.

The patents are actually held by France's Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA), which has been building up a portfolio of LCD technology intellectual property for over a decade.

In this particular case, the CEA believes that Samsung LCDs implement its "vertically aligned high contrast" technique, which improves both image quality and widens a panel's viewing angle, and do so without a licence from the CEA.

The agency already has legal action against Samsung pending in the US courts, along with similar cases against Sharp, Sanyo, Fujitsu, Chi Mei and AU Optronics, the last two being Taiwanese LCD makers.

The European action was prompted by Samsung's decision to begin shipping the allegedly infringing LCD screens in France.

In addition to overseeing France's numerous atomic energy facilities, the CEA is also something of an R&D powerhouse, focusing on microelectronics, nanotech and other fields. Last year, was granted 292 patents. ®

Related stories

Sony sued in digicam patent clash
MS defeated in ergo keyboard patent appeal
Gateway reports HP to ITC
Software patents under attack
Qualcomm claims victory in TI suit
Cisco sued in Wi-Fi patent clash
Seagate gets litigious with small hard drive rival
UK firm patents software downloads
Sony settles Walkman patent case
PalmOne overturns Xerox Graffiti patent
Tech firm seeks $500m for Intel patent 'violation'
Intel to pay $225m to settle Itanic patent clash
Intel sued for Pentium patent infringement