DJI and Insta360 Locked in Two-Front U.S. Patent War, Lawsuits Filed on Luna Ultra's Launch Day

The patent war between DJI and Insta360 has officially arrived on U.S. soil—and it is being fought on two fronts. The timing alone tells the story: on June 10, 2026, the very day Insta360's new Luna Ultra gimbal camera went on sale in the United States, DJI filed two patent lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, seeking to remove the Luna lineup from the American market. Two days later, on June 12, Insta360 fired back with two countersuits asserting five patents of its own.

At the center of the dispute is the handheld gimbal camera—a pocket-sized stabilized shooting device popular among vloggers and travel content creators. DJI pioneered the category with the original Osmo Pocket in 2018. Now, Insta360 is entering the space aggressively with the Luna Ultra and the lower-priced Luna Pro, and DJI alleges both products copy its designs. The backdrop makes the whole affair particularly striking: DJI's own competing product, the Osmo Pocket 4P, cannot legally be sold in the United States.

DJI Sues on Launch Day as Luna Ultra Tops Amazon Sales Charts

DJI's two complaints target different aspects of the alleged infringement. The first asserts two design patents covering the Osmo Pocket's visual appearance—its slender handheld body, gimbal arm, rotatable display, scroll wheel, and accessory slot. The second asserts four utility patents describing functional features: a single-button control to toggle the gimbal between follow and lock modes; a handheld gimbal with integrated subject tracking and live display; an image-driven motor control method; and a standalone tracking system that operates without a companion smartphone app. DJI alleges the Luna lineup infringes all of the above and is seeking a permanent injunction, monetary damages, and a disgorgement of Insta360's profits.

The filing was not spontaneous. Insta360 had teased the Luna as early as the NAB Show in April, prompting DJI to begin preparing its legal case. DJI sent a cease-and-desist letter on May 26 before waiting for the U.S. launch date to file formally. The strategy did not dampen the Luna's debut, however: the Luna Ultra claimed the top-selling spot in the camera category on Amazon U.S. within 24 hours of going on sale, a milestone Insta360 was quick to publicize. In image comparison testing by DroneXL, the Luna's second lens delivered noticeably better performance at longer focal lengths compared to the single-lens Pocket 4, which may help explain the strong market reception.

Insta360: Luna Development Began as Far Back as 2020

Insta360's countersuit asserts five utility patents spanning gimbal stabilization, gimbal direction control, smooth camera stabilization, telemetry data overlay, and panoramic video stabilization—technologies Insta360 claims are widely used across DJI's Osmo Pocket, Ronin and RS series, Osmo Mobile, and Osmo 360 product lines. Founder JK Liu framed the countersuit as a defensive response rather than an opportunistic move.

"At Insta360, we prefer to let our products do the talking. But when challenged, we're not afraid of a legal fight," Liu said. He explicitly rejected the copying allegation and provided a development timeline for the Luna: "Luna Ultra is the result of years of independent R&D and was not a response to any competitor's product," citing the company's earlier ONE R camera, Link webcam, and Flow gimbal stabilizer as design precedents. Liu said the timing of DJI's filing spoke for itself, noting that choosing the launch day was "very telling."

This is already the second legal clash between the two companies in 2026. In March, DJI sued Insta360 in the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court over six patents covering drone flight control, structural design, and image processing, alleging that the technologies in question were developed by former DJI employees within one year of leaving the company and that intellectual property rights should therefore belong to DJI. Over the past year, the two companies have also been actively invading each other's home categories: Insta360 incubated the Antigravity brand and launched a 360-degree drone squarely challenging DJI's territory, while DJI entered Insta360's home turf of 360-degree cameras with the Osmo 360.

Eastern District of Texas: The Venue Choice and the Real Strategic Goal

DJI's choice of the Eastern District of Texas—one of the most plaintiff-friendly patent venues in the United States—is deliberate. Understanding why requires understanding what an injunction can accomplish that DJI's own products currently cannot. The Luna Ultra is freely available for sale in the U.S. market; the Osmo Pocket 4P is not. A court order removing the Luna from shelves would effectively eliminate DJI's most direct American competitor in the category—before DJI has sold a single comparable product of its own in that market.

Whether that injunction will materialize is a separate question. Several analysts who have reviewed the complaints noted that obtaining a preliminary injunction halting Luna sales during litigation carries a high legal bar and is considered unlikely to succeed. For now, the Luna Ultra remains on sale in the U.S. while the case enters what is expected to be a lengthy patent litigation process.

Editorial Perspective: A Symptom of a Distorted Market

Anyone following this dispute should recognize that something is fundamentally wrong with how this situation has developed. This lawsuit is being fought in American courts over the American market because one of the two best pocket cameras in the world cannot legally be sold here—and it should not be that way. The Osmo Pocket 4P and the standard Osmo Pocket 4 are both blocked from U.S. retail because DJI appears on the FCC's Covered List, a designation originally designed to keep foreign-manufactured drones out of U.S. airspace on national security grounds. But these cameras are not drones. They do not fly. They are handheld cameras people hold to film weddings and vlogs.

This argument was made when DJI appeared at NAB Show in April, and nothing has changed since. Yes, the Pocket 4P's camera module shares engineering DNA with DJI's drone camera modules in terms of sensor and stabilization technology—but that is a technical lineage, not a flight risk. A gimbal camera with no rotors, no airframe, and no ability to leave a person's hand is not a surveillance aircraft. Treating it as one is a policy logic equivalent to banning car stereos because they share chips with automobiles. If the concern is Chinese data handling, then the Insta360 X5—an 8K 360-degree camera manufactured in Shenzhen and sold openly at Best Buy—would logically fail the same threshold that blocks the Pocket 4P. Strip away the airspace rationale and the data rationale, and what remains is brand-level exclusion. The people actually being penalized are American creators who simply want access to a better camera.

This lawsuit is a symptom of that distorted situation. DJI cannot win this product category the way a company normally would—by selling a product people can buy—so it is fighting through patent litigation instead, and the injunction it seeks is simply the courts doing what its own hardware has been prohibited from doing in the marketplace. Insta360, meanwhile, gets to play the open-market challenger because Washington has left the door open. Until the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals potentially reopens the U.S. market for DJI, the only winners in the interim are the lawyers. Those non-flying cameras remain trapped under a drone ban that was never meant to cover them—still waiting.

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Sources: Insta360, Mashable. Reporting and editorial commentary by Haye Kesteloo.

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