DJI sues Insta360 for patent infringement

For years, Chinese companies DJI and Insta360 have been in ever-increasing competition, and now the situation seems to be escalating. DJI has filed a lawsuit in China, accusing Insta360 and its parent company Arashi Vision of infringing a total of six patents (including in the areas of drone control and image processing). This is evident from a statement by Insta360 founder Liu Jingkang, also known as JK Liu, on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo.

As a reminder, DJI presented its first action camera that records 360-degree videos, the DJI Osmo 360, last year. With this, the company entered into direct competition with the established Insta360 cameras. In turn, Insta360 entered the drone business through its subsidiary Antigravity at the end of 2025, where DJI is the market leader. After all, the Antigravity A1 proved to be not just another drone, but the world's first model with a 360-degree camera. It has now been known for some time that DJI will launch its Avata 360 as a direct competitor to it on the German market tomorrow, Thursday.

The lawsuit now filed concerns the fact that some former DJI employees allegedly filed patents for technologies while working at Insta360 that they had developed at their previous employer. These technologies were then used in Insta360 products. DJI is therefore now demanding to be transferred all patents filed by its former employees within one year of their departure to Insta360.

According to JK Liu, DJI's lawsuit is primarily about a market giant wanting to defend its market share. According to a rough estimate, eleven of his patents for hardware/construction, eight patents for software processes, six patents for control processes, and three patents for accessories were infringed by competitors last year alone. In reports, media have described many functions and accessories of DJI cameras as “copied” or “astonishingly similar” to Insta360 cameras.

Insta360 itself has not filed any lawsuits in these cases because, as a small company, it has limited resources. Instead of investing in legal disputes, it primarily invests in research and development to increase the market and the “pie” through differentiation. In fact, according to its statements, the company recorded the largest growth in recent years and a new revenue record in the fourth quarter of last year. However, JK Liu did not rule out filing patent infringement lawsuits against competitors himself. This point would be reached if the company is substantially prevented by patents from continuing to bring new products or innovations to market in this product category – and, for example, is no longer allowed to manufacture drones.

Were inventors concealed?

In its lawsuit, DJI points out that Insta360 initially intentionally did not name the inventors. According to JK Liu, however, this is a normal procedure: “For many of our patents, we conceal the inventors during the domestic filing and only disclose them during the PCT filing. This is to respect the inventors and at the same time minimize the time of disclosure of the list of technical employees and the risk of being targeted by headhunters as much as possible” (translation by heise online). Consequently, we also did not name former DJI employees for many of our patent applications. “If the motives were as DJI claims, we would have had no reason at all to name these inventors in the patent application,” said the company founder.

According to JK Liu, the patents filed by the affected employees during this period have been carefully reviewed. The available evidence shows that these are exclusively ideas and independent innovations that originated at Insta360.

In the area of flight control, according to the company founder, the only potentially affected patent is one that allows the user to trigger a “dive” effect at the push of a button, as known from professional FPV drones. “This idea came from me, and I was also heavily involved in process optimization and acceptance,” said JK Liu. However, since this patent has little use under the current flight restrictions, this function has not been implemented. If DJI wants this function, he can gladly make himself available.

Finally, most of the affected drone patent applications were filed four or five years ago, but due to later, significant changes in the product definition, they were often not used at all.

(nij)