DJI Sues Insta360 in Shenzhen Court, Signalling a Broader Tech Battle
The dispute over former employees and patents arrives as both companies move beyond their traditional product lines and into direct competition.
In a sudden escalation of competition within China’s burgeoning consumer drone and camera market, DJI, the world’s dominant drone maker, has filed a lawsuit against its cross-town rival, Insta360, alleging that the camera company claimed six patents that should rightfully belong to DJI. The case, now before the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court, could reshape how Chinese tech firms handle the movement of talent and the ownership of innovation.
According to court filings made public this week, DJI contends that six disputed patents—covering drone flight-control, structural design and image-processing technologies—were created by engineers who left DJI to join Insta360 within a year of their departure, a period during which Chinese patent rules still treat inventions as “service inventions” belonging to the former employer.
Investors reacted swiftly. On 23 March, after news of the lawsuit became public, shares in Arashi Vision, Insta360’s parent company, tumbled seven per cent in Shanghai trading, wiping out more than $788 million in market value.
The legal dispute turns on China’s rules governing “service inventions.” Under Chinese law, inventions or creations made within one year of an employee’s departure may still be recognised as service inventions if they are related to the employee’s former job responsibilities or tasks assigned by the previous employer.
As Yang Anjin, a partner at Beijing Wis & Weals Law Firm, noted, the law can favour the former employer even where a departed employee develops the technology independently at a new company, so long as the work remains tied to the employee’s earlier role and is completed within a year of departure. But that principle has limits. Chen Yuanxi, a partner at Shanghai Hiways Law Firm, said that if a former employer can show only that an employee once participated in related work, but cannot prove when the disputed technical solution was formed, how it emerged, and why ownership should belong to the original company, its claim may not necessarily stand.
A key point of contention is Insta360’s handling of inventor names in patent filings. Some inventors were listed in Chinese patent applications as having “requested non-disclosure” of their names. But in corresponding filings under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, an international system for seeking patent protection in multiple jurisdictions, those same inventors were named, as international rules require. DJI said its comparison of the two sets of filings showed that one inventor Insta360 had sought to withhold was a former core member of DJI’s research and development team. It has presented the discrepancy as evidence that Insta360 was trying to obscure the identities of inventors at the heart of the ownership dispute.
Insta360 rejected that interpretation. In a public response on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, Insta360’s founder, Liu Jingkang, said the company routinely withholds inventor names in domestic patent filings and discloses them later in international applications, arguing that the practice is meant to delay the exposure of technical staff to headhunters rather than to conceal former DJI employees.
Another response by Insta360’s head of China operations added that DJI could itself infringe at least 28 Insta360 patents, but that his company has so far avoided litigation to focus resources on innovation.
Beyond the courtroom, the dispute reflects a widening rivalry across China’s consumer drone and imaging markets. Insta360, long best known for panoramic cameras, has expanded rapidly in recent years. Its revenue hit $1.42 billion in 2025, marking year-over-year growth of 76.85 per cent.
Insta360 made its ambitions in DJI’s turf unmistakable in July 2025 by announcing Antigravity, a new drone brand developed in collaboration with third parties. Its first product, the panoramic Antigravity A1, launched in December, and by January 2026, the company said global shipments had topped 30,000 units.
Meanwhile, DJI, which made an estimated $12.3 billion in 2025 and is aiming to top $14.5 billion in revenue in 2026, has been making a reciprocal push into Insta360’s home market. In 2025, it introduced the Osmo 360, its first panoramic camera, broadening its reach beyond consumer drones, a market where it still commands more than 90 per cent of global sales. By the third quarter of 2025, as competition in panoramic cameras intensified, Insta360’s share had fallen to 49 per cent from about 81.7 per cent in 2024, while DJI’s had risen to about 43 per cent.
Against that backdrop, the suit looks less like an isolated patent quarrel than another front in a broader commercial fight between the two Shenzhen companies.
The stakes could extend well beyond the two companies. The outcome could set a critical precedent for China’s high-tech sector, where poaching talent has become a common strategy for startups looking to accelerate research and development. A ruling in DJI’s favour would affirm employers’ rights to claim post-departure inventions, while a victory for Insta360 could reinforce a narrower view of those employer rights and give more room to employees and new companies to argue that post-departure work was independently developed.
In practical terms, the lawsuit may weigh more heavily on Insta360 than on DJI. This is not a contest between equals: DJI is almost nine times the size of Insta360, giving it far greater financial strength to absorb a protracted legal fight.
DJI has also shown a readiness to go on the offensive in major legal disputes, including its 2024 suit against the U.S. Defence Department over its “Chinese military company” designation and its 2026 challenge to U.S. import restrictions on new models and key components.
Insta360, by comparison, has only just come through a bruising legal battle of its own. Its nearly two-year patent dispute with GoPro, a U.S. action camera maker, concluded in February 2026. Although the outcome cleared the way for Insta360 to keep selling in the U.S. without restrictions, the cost was steep. Liu Jingkang said the company had spent more than $10 million on its defence. That history may leave Insta360 entering this new fight with less room for error.
