Queen’s University and PARTEQ Innovations are taking on Samsung in a lawsuit claiming the Korean electronics giant infringed on several patents.

According to a release from the school and its technology commercialization arm, the lawsuit was filed on Jan. 31 against Samsung Electronics, Co. Ltd. and Samsung Telecommunications America, LLC, for patent infringement and is seeking undetermined damages.

"Queen’s University offered Samsung the opportunity to license the technology to create such return on investment. Samsung chose not to do so, and therefore it has no right to use our intellectual property," the university said in a release.

The suit centres around attentive user interface technologies, which is based on research conducted by professor Roel Vertegaal and graduate students at the Human Media Laboratory in Queen’s School of Computing. Basically with the technology a video will stop when a viewer looks away and starts when the viewer returns their eyes to the screen.

The university said it first applied for patent protection for the technology in March 2003.

A similar technology, known as Smart Pause, appears in the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S4, both released in the market in 2013, which pauses video when a user looks away.

According to the claim the university and Samsung started talks in November 2003 for commercializing the attentive-user interfaces research. The university also says that a confidentiality agreement between the parties was agreed to a month later.

The claim adds that in January 2004, Vertegaal submitted a proposal to the company for "an attentive home theater system that could pause video content and perform other functions by processing a user’s eye-contact cues."

The proposal also put forward possible applications for mobile devices, says the claim.

According to Queen’s, Samsung said the project was not appropriate at the time but offered to collaborate with Vertegaal to develop the attentive home theatre application.

Samsung later informed PARTEQ and Queen’s that it was "not interested in pursuing the project," the complaint states.

In the release, the university defends its position, stating: "Queen’s protection of intellectual property is critical to fulfilling its mission of creating and disseminating knowledge by encouraging faculty, staff and students to produce cutting edge research results."

It added that the patent protections are important not only for the school, but for businesses and Canadians as well.

"Thus Queen’s ability to conduct its research depends in part on the protections afforded by the patent system," reads the statement.

Queen’s and PARTEQ are seeking actual and punitive damages in the suit, which was filed in a federal court in Texas.

— The Whig-Standard