Uni of California sues ‘entire industry’ in LED patent action
The University of California (UC) has filed what its lawyers have called a “first-of-its-kind” patent litigation campaign against retailers of LED lightbulbs, including Walmart, Ikea, Amazon, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Target.
Alongside the lawsuits, all filed yesterday, July 30 at the US District Court for the Central District of California, the university has also asked the US International Trade Commission (ITC) to open an investigation into the retailers.
According to UC, the suits are about “protecting the reinvention of the light bulb” by a Nobel-laureate team at UC, Santa Barbara.
The team was led by led by Japanese-American scientist Shuji Nakamura, who won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on creating blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
According to UC, some of the fundamental components of LED lighting technology were created by Nakamura, alongside fellow scientists Steven DenBaars and James Speck.
The university owns four patents that it says are “fundamental to a new generation of light bulbs” powered by LED technology.
The four patents cover “some of the important innovations of Professors Nakamura, DenBaars, and Speck, including those that use transparent LED structures and packaging to enable filament LED light bulbs,” the suits claimed.
LEDs are semiconductor materials which emit light when current flows through them. Blue LEDs, invented by Nakamura, are essential to creating white light with filament LED lightbulbs, UC said.
Filament LED lightbulbs can last up to twenty years, use far less energy than traditional lightbulbs and don’t contain toxic chemicals.
The university predicted that sales of the bulbs could exceed $1 billion in the US this year.
According to UC, however, the LED light bulb industry had stolen the technology with “utter disregard” for its patent rights.
UC claimed that “substantially all” of the infringing lightbulbs it had found on the US market originated from China and criticised the retailers for sourcing products from “unlicensed foreign manufacturers”.
The university has also asked the ITC to investigate the import of the allegedly infringing bulbs. Lawyers for UC said that it was among the first examples of a university acting as the sole complainant before the body.
Law firm Nixon Peabody, which is representing the university, said that the litigation campaign was a “first-of-its-kind direct patent enforcement campaign against an entire industry”.
Seth Levy, a partner at the firm’s Los Angeles office, said the legal actions were a “message to entities throughout the private sector that university IP rights cannot be infringed with impunity”.
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