Oura and Zepp Health appear to have settled their smart ring patent battle

Zepp Health dropped its patent infringement lawsuit against Oura last month, only a few months after accusing the Oura Ring Gen 3 and Gen 4 of infringing six patents. A newer US International Trade Commission filing now fills in an important missing piece, Oura and Zepp had reached a settlement at almost exactly the same time.

We covered Zepp Health’s lawsuit when it was filed in April. At the time, it looked like the latest escalation in an increasingly messy smart ring patent fight, but that particular case ended rather abruptly.

Zepp dropped all six patent claims

Zepp Inc. and Zepp North America filed their lawsuit against Oura on April 21 in the Eastern District of Texas. The complaint accused the Oura Ring Gen 3, Gen 4 and accompanying app of infringing six Zepp patents covering areas including motion recognition, sensor confidence, stride calibration, health scoring and sleep monitoring.

Less than three months later, Zepp changed course.

On July 10, the company filed a notice voluntarily dismissing the entire case without prejudice. That last part means Zepp technically retains the ability to bring the claims again, rather than losing them through a court ruling. There was no decision on whether Oura actually infringed any of the patents.

Bloomberg Law reported the dismissal on July 13, but at that point the wider picture was not quite as clear. We now have another filing that helps explain what was happening behind the scenes.

Oura and Zepp had reached a settlement

A newer USITC notice published on August 12 confirms that Oura and Zepp had jointly asked to remove Zepp from Oura’s separate International Trade Commission case on July 9.

More importantly, the filing explicitly says the request was based on a settlement agreement.

The timeline is pretty telling. Oura and Zepp jointly asked the ITC to terminate Zepp from that investigation on July 9. The administrative law judge approved the request on July 10. Zepp then dismissed its own six-patent lawsuit against Oura on July 10 as well. The full ITC notice lays out the sequence of events.

The terms of the settlement have not been made public, so we cannot say exactly what each company agreed to. But given the timing, it looks very likely that Zepp’s decision to withdraw its lawsuit formed part of the broader settlement between the two companies.

That makes this more interesting than Zepp simply deciding not to pursue the case.

Oura originally went after Zepp Health over the Amazfit Helio Ring. Last November, it filed a patent lawsuit against Zepp Health and followed that with an ITC action seeking potential import restrictions against Zepp and several other smart ring companies.

Zepp then fired back in April with its own six-patent lawsuit against Oura. For a while, the two companies were effectively suing each other over different parts of their respective wearable technology portfolios.

That standoff has now cooled considerably.

The ITC formally terminated Zepp from Oura’s investigation following the settlement. The Commission confirmed that decision on August 11 and published its notice the following day. That means the Amazfit maker is no longer one of the respondents facing a potential exclusion order in that particular ITC case.

The smart ring patent war is changing shape

There is a slightly bigger story here as well. Oura has spent the past few years aggressively enforcing its smart ring patents, and we have seen disputes involving RingConn, Ultrahuman, Samsung, Zepp Health and others.

Some of those fights are now ending in settlements rather than courtroom victories.

That appears to be what happened with Zepp. Neither side got a public ruling declaring its patents stronger, nor did a court decide that either the Oura Ring or Amazfit Helio Ring infringed the other’s technology. Instead, the two companies appear to have found a way to remove Zepp from the ITC fight while Zepp simultaneously withdrew its offensive lawsuit.

There are still plenty of legal battles surrounding Oura. Samsung remains involved in substantial smart ring litigation, and Oura’s patent portfolio continues to face challenges in several venues. So this is certainly not the end of the broader smart ring patent war.