Company: SNWV
Filing Date: 2025-03-20
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-014141
Chunk: 65

Company: SANUWAVE Health, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-20
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 65
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 pending applications, unknown to us, which may later result in issued patents that our products or proprietary technologies may infringe. Third parties may claim that our products or related technologies infringe their patents or may claim that the products of our suppliers, manufacturers or contract service providers that produce our devices infringe on their intellectual property. Further, we, our licensees, or our licensors, may need to participate in interference, opposition, protest, reexamination or other potentially adverse proceedings in the United States Patent & Trademark Office or in similar agencies of foreign governments with regards to our patents, patent applications, and intellectual property rights. In addition, we, our licensees, or our licensors may need to initiate suits to protect our intellectual property rights.

Litigation or any other proceeding relating to intellectual property rights, even if resolved in our favor, may cause us to incur significant expenses, divert the attention of our management and key personnel from other business concerns and, in certain cases, result in substantial additional expenses to license technologies from third parties. Some of our competitors may be able to sustain the costs of complex patent litigation more effectively than we can because they have substantially greater resources. An unfavorable outcome in any patent infringement suit or other adverse intellectual property proceeding could require us to pay substantial damages, including possible treble damages and attorneys’ fees, cease using our technology or developing or marketing our products, or require us to seek licenses, if available, of the disputed rights from other parties and potentially make significant payments to those parties. There is no guarantee that any prevailing party would offer us a license or that we could acquire any license made available to us on commercially acceptable terms. Even if we can obtain rights to a third party’s patented intellectual property, those rights may be nonexclusive and, therefore, our competitors may obtain access to the same intellectual property. Ultimately, we may be unable to commercialize our products or may have to cease some of our business operations because of patent infringement claims, which could 

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materially harm our business. We cannot guarantee that our products or technologies will not conflict with the intellectual property rights of others.

If we need to redesign our products to avoid third party patents, we may suffer significant regulatory delays associated with conducting additional clinical studies or submitting technical, clinical, manufacturing, or other information related to any redesigned product and, ultimately, in obtaining regulatory approval. Further, any such redesigns may result in less effective and/or less commercially desirable products if the redesigns are possible at all.

Additionally, any involvement in litigation in which we, or