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Apple, Amazon, Microsoft & More Settle Lawsuits With Boston University
curtwoodward writes "Boston University hadn't been very aggressive with intellectual property lawsuits in the past. But that changed in 2012, when the school began suing the biggest names in consumer tech, alleging infringement of a patent on blue LEDs — a patent that, no coincidence, is set to expire at the end of 2014. As of today, about 25 big tech names have now settled the lawsuits, using 'defensive' patent firm RPX. A dozen or so more defendants are probably headed that way. And BU is no longer a quiet patent holder."
For messing with us in the opening scene of The Social Network.
Oh, I get it. They're blue. That's totally non-obvious.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
The murican postsecondary education system, the troll under the bridge to your future.
Silence is a state of mime.
This is the way the patent system is supposed to work. The university creates a useful product based on a real technology advance, patents the idea, and then when it becomes ubiquitous the university is able to calculate the worth of the technology and gets large firms to license appropriately. This is completely different from software patents where it's mostly "I did it first, haha."
Turns out that... you're a dick.
must have been going a little soft. Had to stuff the mattress I suppose.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I thought that if you don't assert your patent from day one, then you can't cry foul later on. How long have they been sitting on this thing, only to turn around and start suing everyone after the process became wide spread.
While BU may be on better ground, and may put the money to better use than some scum sucking patent troll, it still strikes me as trollish behaviour.
down on the banks of the River Charles.
I guess I'm a bit old fashioned, but I always had concieved of universities as being places where the pursuit of learning and new knowledge were ends unto themselves. Patents and "monitizing" of the university system seem to me to corrupt the purity of knowledge and education for their own sakes, replacing those abstract goals with concerns like "how much money will that research be worth" and "will teaching those classes result in higher wages for our graduates (and hence more and larger donations)". Research with intent to commercialize is more properly conducted by commercial research labs. Instead we seem to have decided to shut down the big ones and offload that work to the university system, with a complete lack of concern or interest in the cultural consequences for higher education.
I think we need to add another four years on to our high school education programs, or make some other arrangements so that universities can return to their role of being pure research and learning institutions whose deliberate and specific intent is to foster research and learning without concern for whether it can be monitized. We should be adjusting our "standard" or "high school degree" education standards so that the majority of employment opportunities available in the work force can be successfully handled by those graduates. "Higher" education should not, by definition, be a general requirement for virtually all worthwhile employment in this country.
Undoubtely this view is somewhat impractical, and it is a fair point that universities cost money to run and maintain, but the support of the altruistic pursuit of knowledge is one goal for which I will cheerfully, even eagerly, pay more taxes. I have a deeply held conviction that some things are more important than money, and one of the measures of merit by which civilizations shoudl be judged is how they support those pursuits - if we can't look at anything as fundamental as learning about the world around us without wondering how we can "monitize" what we learn, we are diminished as a civilization.
Boston University is most likely on fairly solid grounds with this patent (unlike, say, most software patents) and within their legal rights to act in this fashion, but I view it as a sad commentary on our society that things have reached the point where a university either needs to or wants to take advantage of a mechanism like patents, which fundamentally restrict the application of knowledge in the first place.
I'm disappointed in /.
No one posted the most fitting and hysterical funny quote
Hamid: What's that?
John Rambo: It's blue light.
Hamid: What does it do?
John Rambo: It turns blue.
Still laughing my ass off every time.
Why did BU go after companies that don't actually manufacture blue leds for anything?
These companies have OEMs manufacture devices that USE blue leds, but they don't manufacture them, therefor going after these companies that way is actually patent trolling...
They need to go after whomever provided Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc... with the blue leds, unless of course that manufacturer has a license to make them.
Either way, I welcome BU to it's new Patent Troll level.
put more into tech / trades schools / apprenticeship to take the load off universities.
Extend high school like costs to students to community college level with 1/2 year tech / trades like plans and make so that universities MUST TAKE ALL community college credits and if they really want you to retake classes / take our class that is just about the same then it must be free of change.
I think Universitys are somewhat lowering standards due to the student loan system and other stuff.
Also Universitys are trying to take the place of old trades schools / apprenticeship ideas and giving people lots of skill gaps as 1 the older apprenticeship system did not give people years of theory with limited hands on up front. Also the University system is not setup to have working pros be teachers or is it really setup to tech hands on skills (in some Fields).
I'm puzzled. The patent (at least the one cited in the article) details a very specific method for creating the crystals in LEDs. I can see BU going after various LED manufacturers (Cree, Philips, Panasonic, etc.). But Apple? Microsoft? Those companies re-sell those components, they don't manufacture them.
My taxes contributed to the funding that made the research resulting in these patents possible. Where is my cut? Are class action suits by "We the people" (the Fed of course) next to garner some returns on those investments?
Nothing I hate more in all of tech than ultra bright blue LED lights.
If it means selling out for just one years reprieve on gear with blue LEDs or just one company decides to pick a different color then Boston universities submarine patent scheme is to be celebrated.
Completely ridiculous to see taxpayer-funded research being patented. If public funds are being spent on research (as they are at BU, even though it's a "private" school), then the results of this research should be released into the public domain.
Interference
BC, aka Boston College, is the catholic college that's not actually in Boston. BU is the research institute in Boston that runs an undergrad school on the side.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
and the world was given Net/1 & Net/2 gratis.
BU is the research institute in Boston that runs an undergrad school on the side.
BU is one of nine R1 research universities in the metropolitan Boston area, accounting for about 10% of all R1 universities in existence (the Research Universities 1 term is strictly American). There are 58 institutions of higher education in metropolitan Boston.
BU is ranked 19th best in the country for research while MIT is #2 and Harvard is #5, so BU isn't "the research institute in Boston" either since it's the third best in the area. (according to the "Top American Research Universities" list from The Center for Measuring University Performance 2012 report [PDF]).
1. I have a PhD in GaN LEDs, and work at an LED company
2. I've worked with "the guy" who won that $1.3M prize for inventing the GaN LED
3. I've worked on large, multi institutions government funded GaN-based projects that Moustakas was also involved on, I am very framiliar with the last 2.5 decades of his research in particular
4. I am very familiar with both the devices and the IP of the field in genearl since I have a few of these kinds of patents
This lawsuit makes no sense. First of all many if not most of the companies don't manufacture any GaN based LEDs. Second of all, that patent covers a technique that no one uses in commercial GaN LEDs. Literally no one. That patent very specifically covers GaN crystal growth by MBE (molecular beam epitaxy). Every single GaN LED company (Nichia, Cree, Soraa, etc.) uses MOCVD (Metal organic chemical vapor deposition) techniques. The claims are of course quite cryptic and difficult to determine their entire implication, but from what I can one of the mains things he is claiming to patent is any GaN structure grown on a foreign substrate with a low temperature poly-crystalline layer. Nearly all commercial LEDs are grown on sapphire of SiC with the use of some kind of low temperature poly-crystalline buffer layer. However there is lots of prior art on this (notice the dates!)
http://jjap.jsap.jp/link?JJAP/30/L1705/
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/48/5/10.1063/1.96549
He also tries to discuss the potential dopant atoms, none of the ones that are mentioned are currently used. Of course I'm not sure exactly which claim their lawsuits are hinging on, but all of the meaningful claims in there are covered by prior art (journal publications) and/or better, old, stronger patents.
tl;dr this patent is bullshit, it covers things that have prior art, or aren't useful
The very notion of intellectual property completely and totally flawed. Just one more case to prove it.
I dare you to try to prove to me that there is a need for the notion of intellectual property. Protip: you can't.
Reality can be more funny than Soviet Russia jokes.
Well if we're going to be technical MIT and Harvard aren't in Boston, they're in Cambridge. But to be fair it's probably would have been better if I had written "BU is a research institute the runs an undergrad school on the side."
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
"f the project was funded by federal monies it belongs to the people of the US, and the University has no business taking a patent in its own name.
So, Yes, if the case of it being paid for by government grants, all citizens do get a piece of that pie, by free use of the technology."
No.. the law specifically provides for universities seeking patents (and copyright) in technology developed with federal funding. There is a "government purposes rights" aspect: The government gets to use the invention with a "royalty-free nonexclusive license", but cannot do things like redistribute or provide it to the general public. It has to be used *within the government* (e.g. if the government funded development of a drug for eternal life, they couldn't set up a factory and distribute the drug to the public, but they could use give it to soldiers).
The law was passed to encourage research into molecular bio/genetic engineering, which was somewhat of an orphan field without much monetary support at the time.
The fact they're suing the companies that are -using- blue LED's in their products, rather than the companies that are -making- blue LED's, points to everything that is wrong with US patent law.
Sue the component manufacturers, not the ones that just happen to be soldering one into their products. What an idiotic system.
Boston University is a private research organization. They happen to run a PRIVATE educational program as well.
So by default, you should assume it wasn't funded with public money, those it is not impossible that it was. It is not a 'publicly funded university' in the sense that its primary funds are not from tax dollars provided by the state.
Patents are EXACTLY INTENDED to work for companies like BU (assuming BU did the actual research or paid an appropriate price for the research/patent at their own risk).
This patent could very well be bullshit in its entirety of course.
--BitStream
Blue LEDs suck. They are harsh and awful looking. I hope BU can have them recall all the ones ever made. I had to cover them all over where I work.
BU's neighbor to the south, Northeastern University, is another R1 research institution in Boston proper. MIT faces BU across the Charles River, technically across the Boston/Cambridge city line (but see below). MIT's frat houses are in Boston proper, pretty much surrounding BU.
I said "metropolitan Boston" to cover technicalities. Metro Boston is split up more than most American cities, with the city of Boston (proper) being so minuscule that it doesn't appear like one of the hubs of the nation, and that's because much of what people consider "Boston" is actually one of the nearby cities like Brookline, Cambridge, Newton, Quincy, Somerville, etc. The "suburbs" basically start around half way through many of these cities. A local is as likely to talk about going to Allston as to Cambridge, yet Allston is a neighborhood of Boston while Cambridge is technically a city. Both are "Boston" when talking broadly, they're only mentioned so as to be diagnostic within Boston.
Look at a population density map @Boston; e.g. Brookline goes from inner city densities to suburban densities pretty quickly. Somerville's 18.4k density is far higher than Boston proper's 13.3k because it doesn't even have suburbs. Compare with population density map @Denver (same population as Boston); Denver thins out at its edges, marking a clear delineation before hitting Aurora or Thornton while Boston doesn't thin at all when headed into neighbors like Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville.