Bear with me for a second, I'm going to play a little fast and loose with the facts of an actual case here. Consider the following scenario.
Imagine Samsung has built an assembly factory for its smartphones and tablets here in the U.S. It imports some components from Korea, and then assembles them into the finished product here.
Now imagine that Apple believes some of the components of Samsung's products infringe Apple's U.S. intellectual property. It therefore brings a complaint to the ITC, under Section 337, and gets Samsung's component imports excluded from the U.S. market.
Here's my question. Can Samsung file an investor-state complaint, under the KORUS FTA, alleging that Section 337 -- as an additional remedy for intellectual property violations by foreign products, beyond the normal domestic court remedy -- discriminates against its foreign investment in the United States (the assembly factory), and thus violates the national treatment provisions of the KORUS FTA investment chapter?
