'LED Alliance' calls for prior art

\'LED Alliance\' calls for prior art

Recent weeks have seen a ground-swell of opinion among LED lighting manufacturers following the granting of US patent 6,788,011 to Boston-based manufacturer, Color Kinetics. The patent appears to give Color Kinetics ownership in the US market of any control of two or more colour-changing LEDs for illumination purposes - something which has caused great concern among lighting professionals....

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http://www.lsionline.co.uk/news/story.asp?ID=-9T01FB

Adam

Re: \'LED Alliance\' calls for prior art

Hooray for the broken patent system and the mountain billable hours it presents to patent attorneys!

Re: \'LED Alliance\' calls for prior art

A little O.T. but I'd rather deal with patant guys than "personal injury" guys. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif There are "patent predators" who either buy a frivolus (but granted anyway) patent or try and get something "obvious" patented. The defense for those using so called "prior art" is to simply show that "prior art" exists. Yeah, the courts end up having to sort it out, but if it's your (company) product/income, it becomes a cost of doing business. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif (I think I have a couple which my employer declined to persue, but didn't want anyone else doing so.) What bothers me is the blatent theft of legit intellectual property by "offshore" perps and the amount of legal capital required to stop importation. This is a growing international problem!

Larry

Re: \'LED Alliance\' calls for prior art

Should be interesting to see how this turns out. CK has been trying to get a patent on this for awhile, IIRC.

Re: \'LED Alliance\' calls for prior art

what Idleproccess said..

Re: \'LED Alliance\' calls for prior art

My problem with the "broken" patent system is multi-fold.

What irritate me the most are the "gotcha" patents like the JPEG patent attempt of a few years ago, and Rambus's numerous memory patents that were applied for as they were taking notes at industry standards meetings and the things they were patenting were being adopted as open industry standards.

So many non-novel concepts are patented like Microsoft's patent on the double-click for embedded devices, and the patent that was granted for the "windowing" method of dealing with the Y2k issue.

Business models and processes have been patented - witness the Amazon patents on "one-click ordering" and affiliate programs.

Patents have been granted for purely anticompetitive motives like the countless patents on low-level serial I/O between cell phones and their batteries or printers and their cartridges intended solely to prevent competing generic replacement parts from working with the original device. There is nothing so special about the device<=>component I/O that must be patented, but patented I/O means that competitors cannot use the protocol in the component and the device can misbehave whenever an otherwise equivalent generic component is used.