DJI and Insta360 Are Fighting in US Court Over Cameras Most Americans Can Only Buy From One of Them

DJI and Insta360 are now in a two-front patent war on American soil, and the timing tells the whole story. On June 10, 2026, the same day Insta360 put its new Luna Ultra gimbal camera on sale in the United States, DJI filed two patent lawsuits in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas seeking to ban the Luna line from the American market. Two days later, on June 12, Insta360 fired back with two countersuits asserting five of its own patents.

The fight is over handheld gimbal cameras, the pocket-sized stabilized shooters that vloggers and travel creators carry instead of a full rig. DJI invented the category with the original Osmo Pocket in 2018. Insta360 just entered it with the Luna Ultra and the cheaper Luna Pro, and DJI says the newcomers copied its work. There is a strange backdrop to all of it: DJI’s own competing camera, the Osmo Pocket 4P, cannot be sold in the United States at all.

DJI sued on launch day, then watched the Luna Ultra hit number one

DJI’s two suits split the claim in two. The first asserts two design patents covering the ornamental look of the Osmo Pocket, including the elongated handheld body, the gimbal arm, the rotatable display, the scroll wheel, and the accessory slots. The second asserts four utility patents describing how the camera works: a single control that switches the gimbal between follow and locked modes, a handheld gimbal with built-in subject tracking and a live display, an image-driven motor control method, and a self-contained tracking system that needs no separate phone app. DJI says the Luna line copies these inventions wholesale and is seeking a permanent injunction, damages, and a share of Insta360’s profits.

The filing was not spontaneous. DJI had been preparing the case since Insta360 previewed the Luna at the NAB Show in April, and it sent a notice letter on May 26 before waiting for the US on-sale date to file. The strategy did not slow the launch. The Luna Ultra ranked as the top seller in Amazon’s US camcorder category in its first 24 hours on sale, a result Insta360 was quick to publicize. In a DroneXL footage comparison, the Luna’s second lens pulled clearly ahead of a single-lens Pocket 4 at longer focal lengths, which helps explain the early demand.

Insta360 says it started building the Luna in 2020

Insta360’s countersuits assert five utility patents covering gimbal stabilization, gimbal directional control, camera smooth stabilization, telemetry overlay, and panoramic video stabilization, technologies the company says appear across DJI’s Osmo Pocket, Ronin and RS, Osmo Mobile, and Osmo 360 product lines. Founder JK Liu framed the response as defensive rather than opportunistic.

“At Insta360, we prefer to let our products do the talking. But we are not afraid of a legal battle when challenged,” Liu said. He rejected the copying claim outright and put a date on the Luna’s development. “Luna Ultra is the result of years of independent R&D, not a response to any competitor’s product,” he said, citing the company’s earlier ONE R camera, Link webcams, and Flow gimbals as the design lineage. Liu read the timing of DJI’s filing as a tell: in his words, suing on launch day “speaks volumes.”

This is the second time in 2026 the two have collided in court. In March, DJI sued Insta360 in the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court over six patents covering drone flight control, structural design, and image processing, arguing the technology belonged to DJI because former employees developed it within a year of leaving. The two companies have spent the past year pushing into each other’s home categories. Insta360 incubated the Antigravity brand and shipped a 360-degree drone into DJI’s airspace, while DJI’s Osmo 360 pushed into the 360 camera market Insta360 built.

The venue is built for the plaintiff, and the injunction is the real prize

DJI filed in the Eastern District of Texas, the single most popular US patent venue and a court long favored by plaintiffs. The choice matters because of what an injunction would accomplish that DJI’s own product cannot. The Luna Ultra ships freely in the United States. The Osmo Pocket 4P does not. A court order pulling the Luna off American shelves would clear DJI’s most direct rival from a market DJI is locked out of, without DJI selling a single competing unit.

Whether that injunction succeeds is a separate question. Several analysts covering the filings have noted that a preliminary injunction to halt Luna sales while the case proceeds faces a high bar and looks unlikely to be granted. For now, the Luna Ultra stays on sale, and the case settles into the slow grind of patent litigation.

DroneXL’s Take

Here is the part that should bother anyone paying attention. The reason this fight is happening on American soil, in an American court, over American sales, is that one of the two best pocket cameras in the world is illegal to sell here, and it should not be. The Osmo Pocket 4P and the standard Osmo Pocket 4 are blocked from US retail because DJI sits on the FCC Covered List, a designation built to keep foreign-made drones out of American airspace on national security grounds. These are not drones. They do not fly. They are handheld cameras that sit in your palm and record a wedding or a vlog.

I made this argument when DJI booked its NAB Show booth in April, and it has not gotten less true since. Yes, the camera on a Pocket 4P shares sensor and stabilization DNA with the camera modules on DJI’s drones. That is an engineering lineage, not a flight risk. A gimbal camera with no rotors, no airframe, and no ability to leave your hand is not a surveillance aircraft, and treating it as one is the policy equivalent of banning a car stereo because it shares a chip with a car. If the worry is Chinese data handling, then the Insta360 X5, a Shenzhen-built 8K camera that sells at Best Buy today, fails the same test the Pocket 4P supposedly fails. Strip away the airspace rationale and the data rationale and what remains is a brand-level blockade, and the people it actually punishes are American creators who just want to buy the better camera.

The lawsuits are a symptom of that distortion. DJI cannot win this category in the US the way a company normally wins, by shipping a product people can buy, so it is fighting over patents instead, and the injunction it wants would do by court order what its own hardware is barred from doing in the market. Insta360, meanwhile, gets to play the open-market challenger because Washington handed it a lane. Whether the Ninth Circuit reopens the US door for DJI is the question that decides this category, and until it does, the only winners are the lawyers. The cameras, the ones that do not fly, are stuck waiting on a drone ban that never should have caught them.

Sources: Insta360, Mashable.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.