Sony Blu-ray Under Patent Infringement Probe

Lucas123 writes "The US International Trade Commission said it will launch an investigation into possible patent infringements involving Sony's Blu-ray players and other technologies using laser and light-emitting diodes, such as Motorola's Razr phone and Hitachi camcorders. The investigation was prompted by a complaint filed in February by a Columbia University professor emerita who says she invented a method of using gallium nitride-based semiconductor material for producing wide band-gap semiconductors for LEDs and laser diodes in the blue/ultraviolet end of the light spectrum. Her complaint asks the ITC to block imports of LED and laser diode technology from Asia and Europe. The total market for all types of gallium nitride devices has been forecast at $7.2 billion for 2009 alone."

Comments

Re:If you patent something

[salimma]

But that's why patents do have expiration dates. But perhaps there should be a time limit on how long the patent holder has to sue, after a product is openly known to use a patented technology.

Still, this must be the first non-frivolous patent claim to make Slashdot headlines in quite some time (the only one I could remember from recently was the dispute over ZFS)

Re:The plan is actually filled in this time...RED

[squiggleslash]

Others have pointed out that you're incorrect. I'm curious why you'd have believed this crap though: if HD DVD had been red-laser based, then HD DVD drives wouldn't have been any more expensive than DVD drives. It's doubtful it would have taken two years for a sub-$200 HD DVD player to appear (and the A3 was heavily subsidized), and virtually every manufacturer currently making DVD drives would have been able to - and therefore would have - jumped into the market almost right away.

There are ways red-laser media might have been practical - indeed, a format called HD-VMD is out that uses red laser technology, choosing to use massive numbers of layers and slightly more efficient bit encoding, to overcome the 4.7/9Gb limitations of DVD. And it'd be interesting to know if red laser media could have been more dense if they'd used the tricks with aperture that BD uses (that gave it the 60% advantage over HD DVD per layer.) But HD DVD didn't use any of these techniques. Had it done so, the media would have been more expensive, but the players would have been much, much, cheaper. We'd probably never have even seen a "war", it would have been game over in 2005, when Toshiba would have released a player much earlier than they eventually did, at a price that everyone could afford, followed quickly by Apex and numerous other entrants from the low cost consumer electronics industry.

Instead we got a blue laser war. Yealch.

Re:How long should that be?

[ZorinLynx]

Maybe this is why hardware companies like Nvidia and ATI aren't forthcoming with the source for their drivers. They're afraid they might be infringing on one or more patents, and that releasing source code would allow the patent holder to find out about the infringements.

Security from patent lawsuits through obscurity? It probably works quite well, especially when you consider how vague and far-reaching software patents can be. You practically can't write a block of code these days without infringing on some patent troll.

Re:True inventor of the blue LED

[FuzzyDaddy]

Just for the record, her patent is here. What she seems to have invented is a way to make pn junctions in wide bandgap semiconductor with the diffusion of atomic hydrogen diffusion to compensate for impurities.

There's no claim that she invented the blue LED. The question is whether the process used today involves this technique.

In truth, there is never one inventor of something. It's all based on previous work. Nakamura can certainly be called the inventor of the blue LED, but he based, as does every inventor, on previous work.