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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.
The murican postsecondary education system, the troll under the bridge to your future.
Silence is a state of mime.
The patent isn't on the mere idea of blue LEDs, but on how precisely to make a particlar blue LED, which was not obvious. Mere ideas cannot be patented, contrary to what many Slashdot posters would like you to believe.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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."
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#The_blue_and_white_LED
The guy who made the first blue LED won a 1.3 million dollar prize. I'm assuming the reason BU is able to collect royalties is that their method is the one that's being used commercially. Look at the description in wikipedia: Does p-doping Indium Galium Nitride seem like a trivial process?
Oh I know, crazy huh? How could they let this patent get by with the clearly obvious prior art of all those blue LEDs that helped light up gadgets in the 80s.
Not like every consumer product featuring LEDs prior to 1994 or so was using red, green, yellow, and amber because depositing the gallium mix required for the blue spectrum bandgap could only be done on a ruby substrate at the time due to the normal process destroying a silicon substrate, thereby making blue LEDs insanely expensive.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Mere ideas cannot be patented, contrary to what many Slashdot posters would like you to believe
You mean someone couldn't patent an idea like buying something by clicking on a button? Oh wait...
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.
It appears this might be all about a Samsung lawsuit they've been involved in for some time. The other companies don't make the allegedly infringing devices, but they do import them, so BU decided to put some pressure on Samsung by suing the customers.
Big pharma. They're the ones with the most money and lawyers.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
In the United States you do not have to be the manufacturer to be sued for patent violation. Users are also at risk, especially if they have deeper pockets. Daft, but true.
(Emphasis mine) I am sure there will be a long discussion about whether someone using a device made with the patented process is themselves "using" the patented process.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
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
There's a difference between design patents and utility patents.
Does p-doping Indium Gallium Nitride seem like a trivial process?
It's trivial with the right equipment and materials. Figuring out that you need to p-dope IGN to make an LED, on the other hand...
Reminds me of the story about the fancy car which, no matter what the shop mechanics tried, wouldn't start. So they call in an old mechanic buddy who had retired a few years ago to come take a look. He studies the engine carefully, making a note of the various fluid levels and temperatures as well as the sounds made by the engine. After going at it for a few minutes, he takes a bit of chalk, marks a spot on the engine, and then hits it with his hammer. With that, the engine roared to life.
He then handed the customer a bill for $100. Aghast, the customer replies, "I'm not paying you $100 for hitting the engine with a hammer!"
The old mechanic replies, "Hitting the engine was free. Knowing where to hit it is $100."
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
Long before modern efficient blue LEDs were invented there were blue LEDs made by various firms, including silicon carbide LEDs commercialized by Cree in 1989 and tinkered with by others, and even a silicon-based blue LED from Sony. They were inefficient and many of them were expensive, so they weren't popular. The first observation of blue LED action was made in 1923, before anyone understood what was happening. In the late 1960s some blue silicon carbide LEDs were deliberately developed. In the early 1970s, RCA made (but never commercialized) blue and violet GaN LEDs. http://www.sslighting.net/news/features/maruska_blue_led_history.pdf
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This actually makes some sense because it would be very easy to abuse.
A large corporation could spin off an independent (ha!) subsidiary, which has full ownership (HA!) of the production facilities. Worse, you could fracture your production facilities into numerous independent subsidiaries, thus forcing patent holders to file a dozen lawsuits, and fighting the "oh, we just do X, you have to prove that it infringes" in every one, or just shutting down a tenth of the whole production. You'd be pricing patent holders out of lawsuits, and in many cases they already are under our current system.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.