Insta360 fires back at DJI with two countersuits over five patents

The legal battle between DJI and Insta360 is intensifying, with Insta360 responding just hours after DJI filed launch-day patent infringement lawsuits over the new Luna Ultra camera. Rather than playing defense, Insta360 has launched two countersuits of its own in the US, accusing DJI of violating five utility patents across several of its most popular product lines.

Insta360’s legal offensive claims that DJI is infringing on its proprietary technology covering core camera functionalities. The disputed intellectual property includes patents for gimbal stabilization, directional controls, smooth camera stabilization, telemetry data overlays, and panoramic video stabilization. According to the complaints, these technologies are used across a wide swath of DJI's catalog, including the Osmo Pocket line, the Ronin and RS professional stabilizer series, the Osmo Mobile smartphone gimbals, and the Osmo 360 camera.

In a public statement, Insta360 Founder JK Liu made it clear that the company would not back down, stating that while they prefer to let their products do the talking, they are fully committed to protecting their innovations and defending their intellectual property.

The retaliatory filing follows a calculated strike by DJI on June 10, intentionally timed to coincide with the official launch of Insta360’s Luna Ultra. DJI’s lawsuits seek a permanent injunction to ban the Luna Ultra from the US market, a move Insta360 claims is an anti-competitive attempt to disrupt their product launch and limit consumer choice in the handheld gimbal category.

Insta360 has categorically rejected DJI’s claims that the Luna Ultra copied the architecture of the Osmo Pocket series. The company maintains that the camera has a completely unique engineering footprint and is the culmination of years of independent research and development that began back in 2020.

According to Liu, the design and technology behind the Luna Ultra naturally evolved from earlier in-house innovations, including the modular ONE R, the Link webcam series, and the Flow smartphone gimbals. He added that DJI’s decision to file lawsuits on launch day exposes a fear of facing a highly competitive product in the market.

Despite the immediate legal friction, Insta360 reports that early consumer demand for the Luna Ultra has been exceptionally high. Within its first 24 hours of availability, the device became the top-selling product in Amazon's camcorder category in North America. The company has assured creators that it remains fully committed to ensuring the continued market availability of its products while the legal battle plays out in court.

Ultimately, the whole dispute is starting to look like an intense corporate catfight and one dripping with political irony. Thanks to escalating US government restrictions and standing executive orders effectively targeting DJI over its Chinese state ties, the drone giant's ability to freely sell new hardware in the American market has been severely choked. 

Because these bans heavily restrict DJI's commercial presence in the US, it raises a glaring question about the validity of the lawsuit: if a company can barely sell its own competing products in the region, what actual "damages" can it realistically claim to have lost to a rival? For now, with a restricted DJI aggressively trying to leverage American courts to kneecap an unhindered competitor, we will just have to wait and see how all this pans out in front of a judge.