Backlash Brews Over Blue LEDs

blue

hi dev, i am, bet you don't know what team is grsi's ? .nando

 

Not Chelski?

 

so that's way blue LED's look funny...

 

Just dont put that red LED in your window.Unless you lie in Holland OH MY rollo

 

we've just put some blue lights up...'tis xmas after all...

 

I was just down in the library, looking up some boring stuff about cloud points, when I noticed that the "New Scientist" of 6 January 2007 has an interview with Prof. Shuji Nakamura, the man who invented the blue LED.

 

Just out of interest Tone's, did it mention the date he invented them? In my experience it's normally quite a long time before things go main stream....

 

I don't recall that being mentioned, but I'll have a look next time I'm down there. And of course what do you mean by "invent"? I presume you mean the date he actually conceived of the idea that resulted in the blue LED. If so, that's the sort of information that isn't usually released to the public, and usually only emerges in the case of a patent interference under the US "first-to-invent" system.

 

OK, I have the article here. The story started in 1990, when Mr. Nakamura grew some gallium nitride crystals of exceptional purity. He started work with them with the sole intention of getting a PhD and enhancing his status in Nichia (he'd come back from the USA with "only" a Masters and was treated like a lab technician). Blue LEDs were not in his thinking at all. At that stage, the R&D Department of Nichia consisted of 3 people, and as much bigger companies were working on other substances, particularly zinc selenide, he thought that he'd work with gallium nitride, a substance about which little was known and in which everyone else had precisely no interest. The company initially paid him $US190 for the invention! He would eventually get $US7 million. The lawsuit forced Japanese companies to offer inventors more money for valuable inventions.

 

Some really interesting information there Tones, thanks for that Just to answer your other question, what I was trying to get a handle on by "invent" was when the item was available to the general public, I tend to find that inventions like this hang around the shelves for quite some time (in this case probably only a few years after 1990) until someone puts it into a mainstream product causing everyone else to latch onto the "oooo, ahhhh" factor as I call it.

$US190, what an insult

 

Perhaps quite a few years after 1990 - the GaN crystals were only the start - the conception would have been somewhat later and the reduction to actual practice later still. You know the bit about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Not really. You have to remember that most of the world works to what used to be known in British common law as "master and servant", that is, an invention made in company time using company materials on a subject that could be of interest to the company and where it was reasonably part of the inventor's job to invent, belongs to the company as of right. In the USA, most inventors get the nominal sum of one US dollar (and that only because a consideration must change hands for an assignment to be valid). The odd one out is the German "Goering" (yes, that one) law, which compels companies to pay inventors depending on certain criteria (very Germanic).

In the case of Japan, the law changed in the 1990s to require that inventors be paid "reasonable remuneration" for valuable inventions, the "reasonableness" being left completely undefined. This is the provision Prof. Nakamura used, first to the Tokyo District Court, which produced the original whopperous $US187 million award.

The most recent embodiment of the UK Patents Act has a similar provision. It has yet to be tested in law.

 

Just a couple of observations.

1. Some years back, I had an ancient VW Polo, which had a set of various coloured LED's on the dash. The headligh main beam indicator was blue, and it failed. Being of the 'no way am I paying VW Main Dealer prices' persuasion, I looked for a replacement in Tandy etc., to no avail. I was at the time ignorant of the fact that blue LED's didn't yet exist.
Eventually I gave in and bought the offending part from a VW dealer. It comprised a 'ground down' white LED, and a blue plastic shroud. Worked fine for me, so why the need for huge court cases?

The 'genuine' blue LED on my Benchmark DAC would take your eye out at 100metres.

Flying across Europe by night, I've noticed that every town has one sinister bright blue light shining and visible from 37.000 feet.

What's that all about then?

Mull

 

police station roof.

 

Blue seems the fashion methinks. All my older stuff had red. One of the reasons I swapped an MF XA1 for an XA2 (apart from sound obviously!) is the blue LED matched the rest of my kit - how vain! From where I'm sitting - 10 ft away - the blue LED on my Trichord dino looks about one inch wide, "holy spectrum theory Batman!" My valve CD player in standby glows red, and when switched on goes tizzy blue - now how cool is that?...

He who has the most toys - wins.