Asetek, a company known for designing water-cooling solutions for PC hardware that it sometimes licenses to other manufacturers, has lost a patent infringement lawsuit it had levied against Cooler Master. The lawsuit, which looked to impede the sale of Cooler Master products Nepton 120XL, Nepton 240M and Seidoen 120 V v.2, stated that Cooler Master was infringing on Asetek's European EP 1 923 771 patent, which describes a water cooling mechanism. This Asetek patent, filed in November 2004 and finally approved in May 2015, is in itself based on Asetek's older, US-bound patents.

However, The Hague's court has accepted Cooler Master's argument that they too have a similar patent to Asetek's, through a so-called "utility model" that already exists in China, which describes (and patents really show their problems here) the "operation of a water pumping engine device with chamber". The The Hague judge also invalidated Asetek's patent lawsuit on the basis that there was not enough inventiveness to it. Asetek and Cooler Master's legal battles aren't anything new; in 2015, a US-based court ordered Cooler Master to pay Asetek $600,000 for patent infringement. This time, it's the other way around, even though it was still Asetek that started the legal battle: the company now has to pay Cooler Master for their legal expenses, which amount to around €113,000 (~$134,204)