Amazon, Walmart, Ikea targeted in University of California light bulb lawsuits

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-retailers-university-of-california-la/amazon-walmart-ikea-targeted-in-university-of-california-light-bulb-lawsuits-idUSKCN1UP24S

by hhs • 7 years ago

131 95 7 years ago

reuters.com

digikata• 7 years ago

"According to the university’s lawyers at Nixon Peabody, the litigation is the first-of-its-kind 'direct patent enforcement' campaign against an entire industry."

Didn't the CSIRO from Australia do something similar with respect to their wifi patents?

el_don_almighty• 7 years ago

good, somebody should sue these people for making bulbs that give people headaches!!!

dheera• 7 years ago

"the litigation is the first-of-its-kind \"direct patent enforcement\" campaign against an entire industry"

Not the first time. Forgent sued a bunch of companies over the use of JPEG [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG

ineedasername2• 7 years ago

And they're not really suing the appropriate industry. Retailers are not infringing the patent. This seems troll-ish. When Apple sued Samsung, they sued Samsung. They didn't sue Verizon, AT&T, etc., that were selling the products.

throwaway36273• 7 years ago

It's a different situation. Samsung is a big company, whereas the lightbulb vendors are fly-by-night resellers/contract manufacturers that don't care about patents. The patent holder goes after the biggest fish because Target is less likely to disappear than JKLM Filament Light Bulb Importing Ltd.

egdod4• 7 years ago

Retailers are not infringing the patent

We normally think about manufacturers being the main infringement target, but the statute also refers to anyone who “makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells” (among other things).

dahdum• 7 years ago

I'd love to see a patent lawyers view of this case. On the face it looks insane to expect retailers to individually weigh patent claims and somehow force suppliers into licensing agreements with third parties.

earthcreed3• 7 years ago

You don't need a patent lawyer, just read 35 U.S. Code § 271. " . . . whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the the patent therefor, infringes the patents.

Amazon, Walmart, etc. aren't likely the ultimate targets of the suit. The suits are designed to bring in the producers under the indemnity portion of their contract with the retailer. Its a jurisdictional hook and way to effectively multiply the amount of pressure on the actual infringer, by threatening to cut off their access to the retailer (which could be accomplished in the ITC) and leverage possible contractual damages they face from the retailer. The ultimate goal is to pressure Everlight, Eaton, and whoever else is making the light bulbs to pay for a license, and using Amazon and Walmart to force them to do so.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

this really looks like they are truly after these five large retailers because they probably cannot affect the manufacturers of the products. so in effect a retailer simply should be able to discontinue selling the product but from the press release that is not the goal of the suit. They clearly state they want products using the technology sold but they want to put the onus on the retailer.

to be blunt it is because these retailers have the means to pass on this fee and not necessarily just by individual product sales.

michaelt2• 7 years ago

In a traditional business, if a retailer imports an item for sale, who else would be responsible for making sure it complied with US law?

IG_Semmelweiss2• 7 years ago

As another ooster has said. The law is pretty clear. Anyone selling is responsible.

What matters is the supplier agreement between retailers and suppliers. As another poster has said, that should heavily favor the retailers. Very interesting case because the fly by night operators that are amazon suppliers will be forced out, leaving a few that will de facto have to comply with US IP laws, even though de jure, they would be inmune

Legogris2• 7 years ago

FWIW, Ikea manufactures their own bulbs.

throwaway36273• 7 years ago

Unlikely. Resellers don't do their own specialized electronics manufacturing. They likely do like other resellers and have them contract manufactured or slap their brand on some generic parts.

delfinom5• 7 years ago

Walmart, Amazon and Ikea all make their store-brand bulbs so that makes them a bigger target. Not because they are retailers alone.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-LED-Filament-Light-Bu... https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90432392/ https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Equivalent-Clear-Non-Dim...

It looks like Amazon may have even pulled their stock now.

delfinom5• 7 years ago

Hah, from the court paperwork

For example, the packaging of the Defendant’s infringing Great Value LED Vintage Edison Light Bulb 4w Deco 2pk (Model: CAD4W22G-2P) touts 13 years of life and savings of up to $184 versus a comparable incandescent light bulb—in a product the Defendant sells for $7.72 per 2-pack as reflected in Exhibit B, discussed below. Case 2:19-cv-06570-PSG-RAO Document 1 Filed 07/30/19 Page 5 of 17 Page ID #:5

nkurz2• 7 years ago

The linked article omits one of the more interesting details, which is that the suit is being funded by a Longford Capital, a private investment company that specializes in funding commercial lawsuits. Usually, third parties are silent about their participation in such suits, but in this case Longford has publicly announced their backing: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190730005899/en/Lon...

Separately, if you haven't tried filament LED bulbs, you should. They are a wonderfully simple design: stack lots of small LED's in string so that they can be run at full wall voltage. The lack of a voltage converter means that there are fewer parts to fail, and the long string of LED's makes heat dissipation a lot easier. I find them better than all the alternatives.

sevencolors• 7 years ago

Yeah, the bulbs are pretty awesome. My partner was complaining last year about how the LED bulbs are ugly to look at and really wanted an Edison like bulb but with LEDs. A quick google later and I was shocked to find that idea already existed.

staticautomatic• 7 years ago

Litigation finance is de rigueur these days. It's unusual that they've affirmatively stated they're funding it, but it's not unusual for there to be a funder and it's becoming more common for details to emerge in discovery about who the funder is and what the details of the funding arrangement are. It's possible that Longford issued a press release because they know or suspect it'll come out in discovery and want to get out ahead of the issue.

https://abovethelaw.com/2019/07/3-thoughts-on-the-future-of-...

sitharus• 7 years ago

The only downside to the filament LED bulbs is the flicker. Much like old fluorescent tubes they flicker at twice the supply frequency due to the very small driver circuitry.

That said I just saw a Big Clive video with a much better driver embedded in the bulb, so tech is getting there.

yeutterg6• 7 years ago

Not all filament designs have horrendous flicker—we are selling one that we designed with 8% worst case, usually more like 2-3% [0][1]. That's better than incandescent.

Even the normal non-filament LED bulbs can have high levels of flicker. I found one product claiming to be "healthy" that had around 55% flicker.

Most of the bulbs in The Home Depot are going to flicker a lot, especially the filament LEDs.

[0] Bedtime Bulb: Low-blue, low-flicker light bulb https://bedtimebulb.com/

[1] When I say percent flicker, I am referring to the modulation percentage. A good primer is this article: https://www.dial.de/en/blog/article/ieee-1789-a-new-standard...

dreamcompiler• 7 years ago

I buy the 12v LED filament bulbs made for RVs. They have Edison sockets, which means that in the case of table lamps it's easy to cut off the plug and replace it with a 12VDC wall wart. No flicker & very low power consumption.

bayindirh• 7 years ago

All the filament LED bulbs I have single die LEDs and have drivers embedded into the bottom of the bulb. I haven't seen multi-LED arrangements without drivers in a filament LED bulb yet.

zaarn7• 7 years ago

The lack of a voltage regulator is quite bad; LEDs reduce their internal resistance as they get hotter, causing them to increase thermal output.

That feedback loop, if not controlled for in some way, can easily destroy the lamp.

You also still need a DC converter unless you prefer a 50Hz hum in your LEDs (which sucks).

userbinator2• 7 years ago

Practically all LED lamps have current regulators, either a resistor or capacitor, and in practice this works quite well and is reliable; the flicker is due to a lack of a reservoir capacitor, either because the manufacturer was being cheap, or the lamp doesn't physically have enough room for one.

Bjartr• 7 years ago

Fewer components is good, but too few (and certain switch wiring) and your led bulb can't be turned off due to the capacitance of the house wiring

https://youtu.be/1uEmX5XClPY

crispyambulance• 7 years ago

I've had more success with the LED filament style than the bulbs with the high current converter embedded in the base. The filament versions do have a simple bridge-diode-rectifier + cap. So the flicker should be twice the line frequency ~120Hz in US.

see this for teardown... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NffhdAz9pc4

I think the high-current, low-LED count bulbs have more thermal issues and problems with dimmers than filament LED bulbs.

Ultimately, however, I think the best approach is to wire up for LED lights using DC lines and a centrally located converter per room/floor. These tend to be used for more expensive lighting, but hopefully they'll gain more traction in the future. Retrofitting a converter to each bulb just seems wrong.

robomartin3• 7 years ago

Not sure what you mean. LED’s don’t have internal resistance. Can you ckarify?

bobongo• 7 years ago

What brands would you recommend?

earthcreed3• 7 years ago

You can also read the actual press release from UCSB, instead of reuters' regurgitation of it.

https://filamentpatent.ucsb.edu/

sfifs• 7 years ago

Why would a PR release be any more reliable than a news article? At least mainstream news articles try to maintain the appearance of being unbiased :-)

earthcreed3• 7 years ago

The news story is just the PR release restated. There is no reporting going on. They even repeated the arguably false statement that this is "the first of its kind", leaving off the one part of the statement that might make it true "by a university".

That was the point of my comment, and I included the link so you could look at both.

elliekelly• 7 years ago

How long until Bezos wakes up and starts doing something to curate/monitor third-party retail products even a little? I know most of their customers don't care about patent infringement but this case is just a byproduct of Amazon's unwillingness to address the problem third-party sellers have become.

IG_Semmelweiss2• 7 years ago

Right now the killer online is:

"Buy from us, we dont sell cheap knockoffs"

However no one can bring amazon to task, since all the other ones (walmart target etc) are also moving in the same direction...hopelessly trying to catch up with amazon

gumby2• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure UCB isn't producing and selling light bulbs, so as a classic NPE (non practicing entity) they are in the eyes of the law nothing but a patent troll.

Not that that may help much.

delfinom5• 7 years ago

Yes but the ability for a university to patent a technology is to fund future research off royalties. NPEs aren't automatically trolls but rather trolls are NPEs.

autokad• 7 years ago

I have concerns of universities and patents. I am leaning towards 'if you want to hold patents and be a non-profit, then all patents must be free use'. I could be convinced otherwise

egdod4• 7 years ago

What’s the difference between a troll and an NPE? I thought they meant the same thing, but that NPE was just the nicer term.

onetimemanytime• 7 years ago

>they are in the eyes of the law nothing but a patent troll.

They invented the technology (according to the claims anyway) so call them whatever you want. You want to use someone's invented tech? Pay for it.

upofadown• 7 years ago

They invented the patent, not some sort of technology. The innovation here is entirely legal.

bdowling5• 7 years ago

they are in the eyes of the law nothing but a patent troll.

Patent troll is merely a term used by critics of the patent system for inventors or patent owners whose actions they disagree with. It is not term that is used anywhere in the law itself.

userbinator2• 7 years ago

I feel like filament LED bulbs were invented in China, or at least that's where I saw them (and LED lighting in general) used far more widely first.

Relatedly, the bigclivedotcom YouTube channel has a huge collection of detailed analysis of various types of LED lighting.

throwaway36273• 7 years ago

What you feel doesn't matter to what is. Many were developed and made in China, but that doesn't mean they have the IP rights secured to sell in any or all markets where other patent holders registered the idea first.

Thorrez2• 7 years ago

If they were made in China before the patent was filed, I think that would be prior art, meaning the patent is invalid.

makomk2• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure filament LED bulbs were invented in China - and patented by their Chinese inventors at the time too. The University of California seem to be suing using broad, trollish patents on things like omitting the rear reflector and allowing LED dies to emit light in all directions. Also, most of the patents were filed after LED filaments became widespread on the market using tricks with patent priority. (The other odd thing is that a lot of LED filaments don't do this - they have a rear reflective metal strip that forms the main structure of the filament.)

bdowling5• 7 years ago

tricks with patent priority.

It's not a trick because in order to assert priority based on a prior application, the invention claimed needs to be completely supported by the prior disclosure. In fact, an applicant will often claim less than what they can in a first application, for a variety of reasons.

01100011• 7 years ago

This sounds like a garbage patent. People have been stacking LEDs in series since they were invented. They put them on a single, transparent substrate. Big deal, seems obvious to me. Is there something special they developed, like a nifty manufacturing technique or previously unused materials?

egdod4• 7 years ago

How do you know it sounds like garbage if you haven’t even looked at it?

mmazing• 7 years ago

How do you know that they didn't look at it?

yeutterg6• 7 years ago

Related: Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) recently lost a judgment by the U.S. International Trade Commission on their patent licensing program [0]. Lighting companies that have fought patent infringement claims against Philips/Signify and similar entities have often won but at a high cost [1]. Many others are intimidated into licensing, or they go out of business.

My understanding is that lot of it boils down to the patents being relatively vague or overly broad coupled with overly aggressive enforcement.

[0] (NOTE: PDF) Signify Loses at the U.S. International Trade Commission in Setback to its LED Patent Enforcement Campaign https://edisonreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ITCSigni...

[1] Great analysis of the toll Philips' licensing program has on the industry by WAC Lighting, which has fought infringement claims: W.A.C. Issues Strong Response to Philips ITC Complaint https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wac-issues-strong-response-ph...

bertm• 7 years ago

Found the complaint in PACER if anyone is interested in reading.

https://www.scribd.com/document/420311557/Complaint-19-06570

mjn• 7 years ago

These are the four patents being asserted, fwiw:

7,781,789, Transparent mirrorless light emitting diode: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7781789B2/en

9,240,529, Textured phosphor conversion layer light emitting diode: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9240529B2/en

9,859,464, Lighting emitting diode with light extracted from front and back sides of a lead frame: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9859464B2/en

10,217,916, Transparent light emitting diodes: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10217916B2/en

Patent numbers found in the PDF of one of the complaints (the one against Walmart) linked elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20571853

makomk2• 7 years ago

Those patents tell an interesting tale, and one not terribly flattering to the University of California. It looks like back in 2006 they invented and patented a variant of the old-fashioned clear domed LED which uses total internal reflection to redirect the light emitted from the rear of the LED out the front, rather than the reflective metal anvil they usually use. This is obviously not a filament LED. The only thing it has in common is that some filament LEDs put the dies on a transparent substrate, though for the purpose of emitting light out the backside of the filament rather than the front. However, they managed to get a set of claims in the '789 patent so broad that it covered all constructions that emit light out the backside of the LED. (The other three patents were filed after filament LEDs became widespread, claiming priority to earlier patents.)

baybal23• 7 years ago

I can't put something more concrete, but I do remember strong prior art case going back a decade.

7,781,789

They claim inventing... a lens? A lens with transparent conductors is still a lens

9,240,529

A claim of "shaped" optical element being used with a phosphor. Again, borderline cretinical wording

9,859,464

Somewhat inventive per se, but wording basically wants to cover all cases of getting light from all sides of an LED, and not a particular implementation.

"We claim a way to get light from all 6 sides of an LED, but we will not say what it is"

10,217,916

... basically a claim on inventing a sapphire LED, which they had nothing to do with. Again, a bare claim

Pains to see those guys got Shuji Nakamura on board just to pump troll patents.

bdowling5• 7 years ago

If you're criticizing the title of the patent or the general field of the invention, then you're missing the point. The scope of the patent is determined by the claims at the end. Those claims are drafted narrowly and only claim what is novel and non-obvious over the prior art, because if they were not then the examiner would not allow the patent. If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the defendants will quickly challenge the validity of the patents and the case will be over.

anilakar• 7 years ago

What's the patent being infringed? Surely "low-voltage components in series with their combined maximum rating above the mains voltage" by itself can't be patent-worthy, so there should be something more specific being infringed.

michaelt2• 7 years ago

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7781789/ "a light emitting diode (LED) that emits light out of the LED from multiple sides of the LED, wherein all layers of the LED are transparent for an emission wavelength except for an emitting layer."

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9240529/ "an LED chip emitting light at a first wavelength, wherein the emitted light is extracted from both front and back sides of the LED chip; a lead frame to which the LED chip is attached, wherein the LED chip resides on or above a transparent plate in the lead frame that allows the emitted light to be extracted out of the LED chip through the transparent plate in the lead frame; and a phosphor for converting the light emitted by the LED chip at the first wavelength to a second wavelength."

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9859464/ "A light emitting device, comprising: a lead frame including a transparent plate; and an LED chip, attached to the lead frame, for emitting light; wherein the LED chip resides on or above the transparent plate and at least some of the light emitted by the LED chip is transmitted through the transparent plate; and wherein at least a portion of the light emitted by the LED chip is extracted from a front side of the lead frame and another portion of the light emitted by the LED chip is extracted from a back side of the lead frame."

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10217916/ "A light emitting device, comprising: a lead frame having a transparent plate therein; and a light emitting diode (LED) chip, mounted on the lead frame and placed on or above the transparent plate in the lead frame, emitting light through at least front and back sides of the LED chip; wherein the transparent plate in the lead frame allows the light emitted from the LED chip to be extracted out of the LED chip from the front or back sides of the LED chip and through the transparent plate in the lead frame."

Amazon, Walmart, Ikea targeted in University of California light bulb lawsuits

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