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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."
You should have a set timelimit on using it. Either you exercise your patent right and setup royalty shit with other companies, or you start using the patented technology, otherwise it's fair game.
That's a lot of Das Blinkenlights!
Really. I could live with green.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Why is she requesting that all imports of the tech in question be stopped? Doesn't this sort of thing usually just end with a licensing agreement? The inventor gets paid, and everybody goes on. The article doesn't mention that she is involved with any sort of competitor, so it just seems sort of malevolent for her to try and put a halt to the entire market.
I certainly hope there is a better explanation, though.
I got a catholic block.
This case is egregious, unless she was living in cave then she had to know that something she believed she'd developed was being widely used.
However, there are plenty of things that you'd struggle to even know were in use. What if it were some new modulation strategy to make the construction of multi-band cellphones easier; there could easily be millions of them in the market before it ever came to your attention.
Why? If she has a valid patent for a legitimate invention that these companies are using in violation of applicable U.S. law, why shouldn't they pay royalties like everyone else? I don't know the facts of the case, and certainly wouldn't depend upon Slashdot for any, but if she did get there first with her invention then they should pay. That's why we have patents. If you look at this reasonably, most of the complaints you hear about patents (not counting software and business-method, which are defective-by-design) are about the issuing of nonsensical, obvious, or overbroad patents. IF this is a legitimate U.S. patent specifically covering a device critical to their product manufacture, they should have two choices: pay up, or work around it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
For everyone yelling 'patent troll,' realize that she has been trying to enforce her rights since at least 1995. She also seems perfectly willing to license the technology http://www.compoundsemi.com/documents/articles/cldoc/7121.html...
I think that is how you're supposed to do things...
"Clearly Sony developed this on their own, so you can't even say they stole it."
Really? Given that her patent claim is 12 YEARS OLD, I don't think the word "clearly" means what you think it means.
"U.S. Patent No. 4,904,618, "Process for Doping Crystals of Wide Band Gap Semiconductors," and U.S. Patent No. 5,252,499, "Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors Having Low Bipolar Resistivity and Method of Formation"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I think she'll go away once infringement has been settled. Having settled with Philips and Toyoda this doesn't look much like a troll to me.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Except this isn't a story of this sort. It is not a bullshit patent. The patent owner has a legitimate and important technological innovation that she patented in the mod-90's that opens up a whole new type of semiconductor technology. Many companies have licensed the technology without any problems. A few bad actors (some are very large companies like Sony) have ignored the patent and attempts to negotiate a reasonable license. In frustration the inventor is asking that legal remedies in place to deal with this situation be triggered.
Without this sort of patent protection this is clearly a case where an individual and obviously very creative inventor would just get run over by large companies.
When you made your indepth investigation of dates on wikipedia, why did you only look at one side? It's nice that that Nakamura claims invention of the blue LED (not what Neuman is suing over btw) in 1991. But the patent that she is suing over is for a particular type of doping that is useful to create these LEDs - which she filed in 1988.
Try and get your basic facts rights before you post your pathetic righteous indignation that the FTC doesn't just conduct its business on wikipedia.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
That's because they don't have to compete against HD any more.
You must be thinking copyrights, or trade secrets. Because patent law don't care one tiny bit whether anything was stolen, pirated, plundered, copied, leaked, miasspropriated, derived from, inspired by, just coincidental, or "discovered" completely independently in an entirely different galaxy by a lone martian who's never even heard of the patentee or patent office. There's no shred of moral justification for patents like there could be with copyright. That's why patents are so offensive; they're a claim over not just the appropriation of "thought", but over the entire ownership of a particular thought and the absolute dominion and authority to exclude the entire human race ever having it, even if they do so entirely on their own or even just accidentally.
And as for the people asking why she didn't do something with the patent herself, to manufacture anything. Well, odds are really really good that even if she did have all the intent and means to do so (which may be arguable), that she couldn't do so because then she herself would be violating somebody else's patent. Having a patent to "A" doesn't give you any rights to make "A" at all. All having a patent does is the give you the authority to make sure that nobody else can do "A" either. Patents only take away, they never give.
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.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.