University of California targets GE in patent suit
General Electric (GE) is the latest to face the wrath of the University of California in a patent infringement lawsuit centring on light-emitting diodes (LED) light bulb filaments.
The regents of the university filed the claim at the US District Court for the Central District of California on Friday, December 20, alleging that GE’s vintage LED bulbs product line infringe three of the University of California’s patents.
“The regents bring this complaint as part of its campaign to spearhead a broader, national response to the existential threat to university technology transfer that is posed by the widespread disregard for university patent rights that is prevalent today,” said the claim.
According to UC, the suits are focused on “protecting the reinvention of the light bulb” by a Nobel-laureate team at UC, Santa Barbara. The team was led by Japanese-American scientist Shuji Nakamura, who won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on creating blue LEDs.
In the latest case, the university claimed that GE and others “routinely take unfair advantage of academic openness” by exploiting university IP with impunity and then profiting from selling infringing goods.
“By flooding the market with unauthorised products, they cripple the ability of university technology transfer programmes to effectively license universities’ IP,” alleged the claim.
According to the regents, the university’s inventions have been stolen by unlicensed foreign manufacturers, imported into the US and then sold to an “unwitting consuming public” by GE.
Back in July, the university filed what its lawyers 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 filed at the US District Court for the Central District of California, the university also asked the US International Trade Commission (ITC) to open an investigation into the retailers. In August, the ITC agreed to investigate.
Seth Levy, a partner at Nixon Peabody, the firm representing the University of California, 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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