dryriver writes: Everybody seems to think these days that kids desperately need to learn how to code when they turn six years old. But this ignores a glaring fact -- the biggest shortage in the future labor market is not people who can code competently in Python, Java or C++, it is people who can actually discover or invent completely new and better ways of doing things, whether this is in CS, Physics, Chemistry, Biology or other fields. If you look at the history of great inventors, the last truly gifted, driven and prolific non-corporate inventor is widely regarded to be Nikola Tesla, who had around 700 patents to his name by the time he died. After Tesla, most new products, techniques and inventions have come out of corporate, government or similar structures, not from a good old-fashioned, dedicated, driven, independent-minded, one-person inventor who feverishly dreams up new things and new possibilities and works for the betterment of humanity.

How do you teach inventing to kids? By teaching them the methods of Genrikh Altshuller, for example. Seriously, does teaching five to seven year olds 50-year-old CS/coding concepts and techniques do more for society than teaching kids to rebel against convention, think outside the box, turn convention upside down and beat their own path towards solving a thorny problem? Why does society want to create an army of code monkeys versus an army of kids who learn how to invent new things from a young age? Or don't we want little Nikola Teslas in the 21st Century, because that creates "uncertainty" and "risk to established ways of doing things?"

The US office responsible for patents and trademarks is trying to figure out how AI might call for changes to copyright law, and it's asking the public for opinions on the topic. From a report: The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the Federal Register last month saying it's seeking comments, as spotted by TorrentFreak. The office is gathering information about the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights. It outlines thirteen specific questions, ranging from what happens if an AI creates a copyright-infringing work to if it's legal to feed an AI copyrighted material. It starts off by asking if output made by AI without any creative involvement from a human should qualify as a work of authorship that's protectable by US copyright law. If not, then what degree of human involvement "would or should be sufficient so that the work qualifies for copyright protection?" Other questions ask if the company that trains an AI should own the resulting work, and if it's okay to use copyrighted material to train an AI in the first place. "Should authors be recognized for this type of use of their works?" asks the office. "If so, how?"

Cloudflare was sued by a notorious patent troll Blackbird Technologies in 2016. Instead of giving up to its demands, Cloudflare employed a different strategy. From a blog post: In October 2016, Blackbird was looking to acquire additional patents for their portfolio when they found an incredibly broad software patent with the ambiguous title, "PROVIDING AN INTERNET THIRD PARTY DATA CHANNEL." They acquired this patent from its owner for $1 plus "other good and valuable consideration." A little later, in March 2017, Blackbird decided to assert that patent against Cloudflare. [...] Companies facing such claims usually convince themselves that settlements in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are quicker and cheaper outcomes than facing years of litigation and millions of dollars in attorneys fees. We decided we would do our best to turn the incentive structure on its head and make patent trolls think twice before attempting to take advantage of the system. We created Project Jengo in an effort to remove this economic asymmetry from the litigation. In our initial blog post we suggested we could level the playing field by: (i) defending ourselves vigorously against the patent lawsuit instead of rolling over and paying a licensing fee or settling, (ii) funding awards for crowdsourced prior art that could be used to invalidate any of Blackbird's patents, not just the one asserted against Cloudflare, and (iii) asking the relevant bar associations to investigate what we considered to be Blackbird's violations of the rules of professional conduct for attorneys.

As promised, we fought the lawsuit vigorously. And as explained in a blog post earlier this year, we won as convincing a victory as one could in federal litigation at both the trial and appellate levels. In early 2018, the District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the case Blackbird brought against us on subject matter eligibility grounds in response to an Alice motion. In a mere two-page order, Judge Vince Chhabria held that "[a]bstract ideas are not patentable" and Blackbird's assertion of the patent "attempts to monopolize the abstract idea of monitoring a preexisting data stream between a server and a client." Essentially, the case was rejected before it ever really started because the court found Blackbird's patent to be invalid. Blackbird appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which unceremoniously affirmed the lower court decision dismissing the appeal just three days after the appellate argument was heard. Following this ruling, we celebrated.

As noted in our earlier blog post, although we won the litigation as quickly and easily as possible, the federal litigation process still lasted nearly two years, involved combined legal filings of more than 1,500 pages, and ran up considerable legal expenses. Blackbird's right to seek review of the decision by the US Supreme Court expired this summer, so the case is now officially over. As we've said from the start, we only intended to pursue Project Jengo as long as the case remained active. Even though we won decisively in court, that alone is not enough to change the incentive structure around patent troll suits. Patent trolls are repeat players who don't have significant operations, so the costs of litigation and discovery are much less for them.

schwit1 shares a report from The New York Times: The N.I.H. and the F.B.I. have begun a vast effort to root out scientists who they say are stealing biomedical research for other countries from institutions across the United States. Almost all of the incidents they uncovered and that are under investigation involve scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, allegedly stealing for China. Seventy-one institutions, including many of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States, are now investigating 180 individual cases involving potential theft of intellectual property. The cases began after the N.I.H., prompted by information provided by the F.B.I., sent 18,000 letters last year urging administrators who oversee government grants to be vigilant. So far, the N.I.H. has referred 24 cases in which there may be evidence of criminal activity to the inspector general's office of the Department of Health and Human Services, which may turn over the cases for criminal prosecution.

The investigations have fanned fears that China is exploiting the relative openness of the American scientific system to engage in wholesale economic espionage. At the same time, the scale of the dragnet has sent a tremor through the ranks of biomedical researchers, some of whom say ethnic Chinese scientists are being unfairly targeted for scrutiny as Washington's geopolitical competition with Beijing intensifies. The alleged theft involves not military secrets, but scientific ideas, designs, devices, data and methods that may lead to profitable new treatments or diagnostic tools. Some researchers under investigation have obtained patents in China on work funded by the United States government and owned by American institutions, the N.I.H. said. Others are suspected of setting up labs in China that secretly duplicated American research, according to government officials and university administrators. [...] [R]oughly a dozen scientists are known to have resigned or been fired from universities and research centers across the United States so far. Some have declined to discuss the allegations against them; others have denied any wrongdoing. In several cases, scientists supported by the N.I.H. or other federal agencies are accused of accepting funding from the Chinese government in violation of N.I.H. rules. Some have said that they did not know the arrangements had to be disclosed or were forbidden.

David Ruddock of AndroidPolice technology blog tries to make sense of last week's $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit by Google. He argues that Fitbit's offerings -- hardware, software, engineering talent, or even patent wall -- can't save Google's wearable operating system Wear OS. From his column: Hardware is what Google is after, with a blog post cleatly stating its acquisition of Fitbit is about future Wear OS devices, meaning you can probably kiss Fitbit's unloved smartwatch OS goodbye. So, that means we can count on Google leveraging Fitbit's renowned hardware to finally give Wear OS the horsepower and capabilities it needs to compete with Apple, right? Well, no. Fitbit's smartwatches have been most lauded for their long battery life, which has historically been enabled by extremely slow but highly power-efficient processors. The Versa 2 allegedly comes with significant performance improvements, but as a smartwatch, it just isn't very... smart. Michael Fisher points out in his review that the Versa 2's near week-long life on a single charge is only impressive when looked at in a very generous light. The Versa 2 doesn't have GPS, the battery only lasts that long when not using the always-on display (with AoD, it's closer to 3 days), the watch itself doesn't work for almost anything but fitness tracking on its own, and most of your interactions with it end up happening on your smartphone anyway. I can also tell you from experience that the Apple Watch Series 5 lasts about two days on a charge with the always-on display enabled (and Samsung's watches last even longer), so Fitbit managing a day more which a much less useful watch isn't exactly game-changing technology.

In short, Fitbit's products are not ones Google should be excited about buying. The hardware is nothing special, and the software is clearly going in the dumpster. What has Google bought, then? The sad, very practical truth is probably patents and engineers. Fitbit does develop at least some of its hardware in-house, and likely has a decent number of patents related to fitness tracking and basic wearable technology, including those stemming from its acquisition of Pebble. Its product engineers would receive resources and tools at Google that Fitbit may not have afforded them. In short: Google's purchase is almost certainly a speculative one. Google is hoping that Fitbit's technology portfolio and its engineering talent can create a better, faster, stronger Wear OS watch. That isn't the kind of acquisition that screams "our product is successful," it's one that looks far more like a Hail Mary from a company that is rapidly losing any hope of remaining relevant in the wearables space. A more cynical view of Google's acquisition might argue that this is more about Fitbit's brand and users than anything else. If Google simply markets its in-house smartwatches as Fitbits running Wear OS, it would be more able to tap into Fitbit's existing customer base and retail relationships. Customer base is something Wear OS is sorely missing at the moment, and Fitbit is a brand that many consumers recognize, albeit mostly for the company's "dumb" fitness trackers, not its smartwatches. Speaking of, given Google's focus on Wear OS as part of this acquisition, my guess is that those more popular but very basic trackers will be discontinued.

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from Futurism: Canada's Hyperstealth Biotechnology already manufactures camouflage uniforms for militaries across the globe. But now, the company has patented a new "Quantum Stealth" material that disguises a military's soldiers -- or even its tanks, aircraft, and ships -- by making anything behind it seem invisible. Earlier in October, Hyperstealth filed a patent for the material, which doesn't require a power source and is both paper-thin and inexpensive -- all traits that could make it appealing for use on the battlefield. Alongside the news of the patent application, Hyperstealth released more than 100-minutes worth of footage describing and demonstrating the material.

Roomba robotic vacuum maker IRobot Corp. is suing rival SharkNinja for copying a device of theirs and selling it at "half the price." "Shark is not even shy about being a copycat," iRobot said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Boston, "claiming that the Shark IQ Robot offers the same iRobot technology at 'half the price of iRobot i7+'."Bloomberg reports: The company that unveiled the Roomba robotic vacuum in the early 2000s launched a product last year that takes house cleaning to a new level: It maps your home, schedules sweeps through each room, empties the dust bin itself and even knows where to resume cleaning after has returned to its base for a recharge. After being recognized by Time magazine for one of 2018's inventions of the year, IRobot Corp. says it's no accident that rival SharkNinja Operating LLC came out with a similar device a year later. [...] SharkNinja, a unit of closely held EP Midco LLC, on Friday filed a pre-emptive lawsuit in federal court in Delaware, asking the court to declare that the Shark IQ doesn't infringe six patents cited in iRobot's complaint, nor five others. IRobot had previously demanded that the Shark IQ be pulled off store shelves.

Bodhammer shares a report from Popular Mechanics: The U.S. Navy has jumped into the game by filing a patent for a compact fusion reactor, according to exclusive reporting by The War Zone. The success of the device, developed by researcher Salvatore Cezar Pais of the Naval Air Warfare Center -- Aircraft Division, relies on a part called a dynamic fusor. According to the patent, Pais' plasma chamber contains several pairs of these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in order to create a "concentrated magnetic energy flux" that can squish the gases together.

Coated with an electrical charge, the cone-shaped fusors pump fuel gases like Deuterium or Deuterium-Xenon into the chamber, which are then put under intense heat and pressure to create the nuclei-fusing reaction. Current technology at reactors around the world use superconductors to create a magnetic field. The War Zone reports that the device could potentially produce more than a terawatt of energy while only taking in power in the kilowatt to megawatt range.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a bid by the University of Wisconsin's patent licensing arm to reinstate its legal victory against Apple in a fight over computer processor technology that the school claimed the company used without permission in certain iPhones and iPads. From a report: The justices, on the first day of their new term, declined to review a lower court's 2018 decision to throw out the $506 million in damages that Apple was ordered to pay after a jury in 2015 decided the company infringed the university's patent. The licensing body, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), filed suit in 2014, alleging infringement of a 1998 patent on a "predictor circuit" to help speed the way processors carry out computer program instructions. The patent was developed by computer science professor Gurindar Sohi and three of his students at the university, located in Madison, Wisconsin. WARF, which helps patent and commercialize the university's inventions, claimed that Apple incorporated the technology in its A7, A8 and A8X processors, found in the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus, as well as several versions of the iPad tablet. Apple disputed the claims, saying its processor worked differently based on the specific language spelled out in WARF's patent.

AmiMoJo quotes ZDNet: Semiconductor manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd (TSMC) has filed multiple lawsuits against its competitor GlobalFoundries, saying the US company allegedly infringed upon 25 patents related to its node processes. TSMC said on Monday that the lawsuits are seeking injunctions to stop GlobalFoundries from manufacturing and selling semiconductor products that allegedly infringe upon the patents in question...

The 25 TSMC patents in the complaints relate to technologies such as FinFET designs, shallow trench isolation techniques, double patterning methods, advanced seal rings and gate structures, and innovative contact etch stop layer designs, TSMC said. These technologies are used to create TSMC's 40nm, 28nm, 22nm, 14nm, and 12nm node processes.

JustAnotherOldGuy quotes ItsFOSS: The GNOME Foundation is facing a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes its patent.

Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation says "We have retained legal counsel and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit. Due to the ongoing litigation, we unfortunately cannot make any further comments at this time."

While Neil cannot make any further comments on this issue, let me throw some lights on this matter. The patent in the question deals with wireless image distribution. The patent is ridiculous because it could mean any software that transfers images from one device to another could be violating this patent.
BoingBoing adds: Rothschild was only recently awarded a patent relating to wifi image transfers, but he has a long history taking companies like Apple and Samsung to court. His LLC was named in 2015 as the single largest nonpracticing entity by defendant count; a NPE is a company or person who holds patents but makes no products, instead pursuing companies that do for settlements. One website counts 30 lawsuits filed since June involving Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, with more than 100 ongoing.
ZDNet argues the suit " doesn't make much sense. But when has that ever stopped a patent troll?"

Apple has applied for a patent to use the logo on the back of its phones as a notification light. The patent application, which was first spotted by Apple Insider, outlines how the "adjustable decoration" could respond to events such as "incoming communication" or "a calendar reminder" by changing its appearance or flashing to attract your attention. The Verge reports: The feature makes sense for Apple's products. After all, the company has a history of illuminating its logo on its older MacBooks, even if it dropped the design feature with the laptop's 2015 redesign. It wouldn't be a massive leap for it to bring back its illuminated logo with a little practical functionality added. The application makes frequent references to "cellular telephone" calls as part of its description, which heavily suggests that Apple is considering using the feature on a future iPhone. However, the patent also includes images showing a series of "illustrative electronic devices" including a laptop, a tablet, and what appears to be an iMac.

The US spends more per capita on medication than anywhere else in the world. It's a key electoral issue. From a report on Financial Times (paywalled): All over the world, drugmakers are granted time-limited monopolies -- in the form of patents -- to encourage innovation. But America is one of the only countries that does not combine this carrot with the stick of price controls. The US government's refusal to negotiate prices has contributed to spiralling healthcare costs which, said billionaire investor Warren Buffett last year, act "as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy." Medical bills are the primary reason why Americans go bankrupt. Employers foot much of the bill for the majority of health-insurance plans for working-age adults, creating a huge cost for business.

In February, Congress called in executives from seven of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and asked them: why do drugs here cost so much? The drugmakers' answer is that America is carrying the cost of research and development for the rest of the world. They argue that if Americans stopped paying such high prices for drugs, investment in innovative treatments would fall. President Trump agrees with this argument, in line with his "America first" narrative, which sees other countries as guilty of freeloading. For the patients on the trip, the notion is galling: insulin was discovered 100 years ago, by scientists in Canada who sold the patent to the University of Toronto for just $1. The medication has been improved since then but there seems to have been no major innovation to justify tripling the list price for insulin, as happened in the US between 2002 and 2013.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Huawei's chief executive has proposed selling its current 5G know-how to a Western firm as a way to address security concerns voiced by the U.S. and others about its business. Ren Zhengfei said the buyer would be free to "change the software code." That would allow any flaws or supposed backdoors to be addressed without Huawei's involvement. Huawei has repeatedly denied claims that it would help the Chinese government spy on or disrupt other countries' telecoms systems, and says it is a private enterprise owned by its workers.

Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei made the proposal in interviews with the Economist and the New York Times. It would include ongoing access to the firm's existing 5G patents, licenses, code, technical blueprints and production engineering knowledge. "[Huawei is] open to sharing our 5G technologies and techniques with U.S. companies, so that they can build up their own 5G industry," the NYT quoted Ren as saying. "This would create a balanced situation between China, the U.S. and Europe." Speaking to the Economist he added: "A balanced distribution of interests is conducive to Huawei's survival." A spokesman for Huawei has confirmed the quotes are accurate and the idea represents a "genuine proposal." South Korea's Samsung and China's ZTE are other alternatives. "Huawei misunderstands the underlying problem," Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, from the European Centre for International Political Economy, told the BBC. "The issue is not the trustworthiness of Huawei as a vendor but the legal obligations that the Chinese government imposes on it.

"China's National Intelligence Law requires Chinese businesses and citizens to surrender any data or 'communication tools' they may have access to, under strict punitive sanctions," said Lee-Makiyama. "Any equipment or software that Huawei licenses to an U.S. entity would still fall under this obligation, and there is no way that the licensing entity or the intelligence agencies could scrutinize millions of lines of code for potential backdoors."

PatentlyApple has spotted several patents that suggest Apple is playing with the idea of making the Apple Watch's band identify users via their wrist's skin texture and arm hair. TechCrunch reports: The first patent describes a sensor built into the Watch or the watch's band that could use infrared to build a thermal image of your wrist and its identifying traits (like skin texture/arm hair) to identify who is wearing it -- sort of like a fingerprint, but from your wrist. Unlike most of Apple's other devices, the Apple Watch doesn't currently have any sort of built-in biometrics for unlocking -- there's no thumbprint sensor for Touch ID, or camera for Face ID. Unlocking your Apple Watch means poking at the screen to punch in a PIN (or, if you've configured it to unlock when you unlock your phone, doing that). A sensor setup like this could make the unlocking process automatic without the need to unlock your phone.

The second granted patent describes a Watch band that can adjust itself on the fly -- think Nike's self-tightening shoes, but on your wrist. If the Watch detects that it's sliding while you're running (or if the aforementioned thermal sensors need a closer look at your wrist skin) tensioners in the device could tighten or loosen the band on command. Finally, a third granted patent tinkers with the idea of a Watch band with built-in light-up indicators -- like, say, a notification light for incoming texts, or a meter that fills up to tell you at-a-glance how much distance you've got left on your run, or a stripe that glows yellow when you've got something on your calendar in the next hour. All of this can already be done on the Watch's screen, of course -- this would just allow for it without having to power up the entire display.

An anonymous reader writes: For years, Microsoft used its patents as a way to profit from open-source products. The poster-child for Microsoft's intellectual property aggression were the File Allocation Table (FAT) patents. But the Microsoft of then is not the Microsoft of now. First, Microsoft open-sourced its entire patent portfolio and now Microsoft is explicitly making its last remaining FAT intellectual property, the exFAT patents, available to Linux and open source via the Open Invention Network (OIN). Microsoft announced that it now loves Linux and "we say that a lot, and we mean it! Today we're pleased to announce that Microsoft is supporting the addition of Microsoft's exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) technology to the Linux kernel." ExFAT is based on FAT, one of the first floppy disk file systems. Over time, FAT became Microsoft's files ystem of choice for MS-DOS and Windows. It would become the default file system for many applications. Microsoft extended FAT to flash memory storage devices such as USB drives and SD cards in 2006 with exFAT. While FAT isn't commonly used today, exFAT is used in hundreds of millions of storage device. Indeed, exFAT is the official file system for SD Card Association's standard large capacity SD cards.

Now, Microsoft states: "It's important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft's technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate the development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN's 3040+ members and licensees." Specifically, according to a Microsoft representative, "Microsoft is supporting the addition of the exFAT file system to the Linux kernel and the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition."

Companies are constantly patenting strange things they have no intention of developing. From a report: Amazon is putting humans in cages to protect them from machines! Facebook is selling your face to advertisers so it can CGI you into ads! Sony has a system where you can skip ads if you stand up and yell the brand's name! None of these things are technically true -- they're headlines driven by patents filed by these companies. In each case, the company has not developed these technologies. And it's likely that they never will. And yet, head-scratching and sometimes hilarious patents continue to populate the patent office and generate headlines. So why are there so many strange, somewhat terrifying patents that companies will likely never act on?

There are lots of reasons to patent something. The most obvious one is that you've come up with a brilliant invention, and you want to protect your idea so that nobody can steal it from you. But that's just the tip of the patent strategy iceberg. It turns out there is a whole host of strategies that lead to "zany" or "weird" patent filings, and understanding them offers a window not just into the labyrinthine world of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and its potential failings, but also into how companies think about the future. And while it might be fun to gawk at, say, Motorola patenting a lie-detecting throat tattoo, it's also important to see through the eye-catching headlines and to the bigger issue here: Patents can be weapons and signals. They can spur innovation, as well as crush it.

A Texas-based, father/son team raised $4.5 million in seed funding to build "a remarkable electric motor technology," reports New Atlas.

Long-time Slashdot reader Namarrgon writes: Linear Labs' impressive new circumferential flux motor design (video) uses four rotors [where other motors typically run one or two] and a software-reconfigurable, multi-coil stator, enclosed in a 3D magnetic "torque tunnel" to maximize efficiency even at high speeds. The stator can be configured on the fly by regrouping coils to use a variable number of overlapping phases simultaneously, producing full torque smoothly at low rpms without torque pulsing, or changing speeds with no change to frequency, current, or voltage, like an electronic transmission. An innovative approach to field weakening by gradually misaligning permanent magnets allows efficiencies to actually climb as speeds increase.

These features produce a highly compact motor with two to five times the torque density, at least three times the power density and at least twice the total output of any conventional permanent magnet motor of the same size. This also eliminates the need for gearing in many applications, reducing costs and weight while gaining 10-20% more range from a given battery pack.

Linear Labs has received 21 patents so far, with another 29 pending, and their prototypes have been verified by independent expert tests. Recently they received $4.5 million in seed funding, and are planning to build them into car and scooter prototypes over the next couple of years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC An artificial intelligence system should be recognized as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says. The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore. Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans -- to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognized. The academics say this is "outdated." And it could see patent offices refusing to assign any intellectual property rights for AI-generated creations. As a result, two professors from the University of Surrey have teamed up with the Missouri-based inventor of Dabus AI to file patents in the system's name with the relevant authorities in the UK, Europe and US. Dabus is designed to develop new ideas, which is "traditionally considered the mental part of the inventive act," according to creator Stephen Thaler.

Law professor Ryan Abbott told BBC News: "These days, you commonly have AIs writing books and taking pictures - but if you don't have a traditional author, you cannot get copyright protection in the US. So with patents, a patent office might say, 'If you don't have someone who traditionally meets human-inventorship criteria, there is nothing you can get a patent on.' In which case, if AI is going to be how we're inventing things in the future, the whole intellectual property system will fail to work." He suggested an AI should be recognized as being the inventor and whoever the AI belonged to should be the patent's owner, unless they sold it on.

The University of California is suing five major retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, IKEA, and Bed Bath & Beyond, for infringing on four patents related to "filament" LED light bulbs. Reuters reports: These patents relate to what the university called the "reinvention of the light bulb" by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara led by professor Shuji Nakamura, who won the 2014 Nobel prize for physics. The university is seeking unspecified damages, including royalties, in lawsuits filed with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, and wants the retailers to enter license agreements. It has also asked the U.S. International Trade Commission to open a probe into the retailers' conduct, saying the retailers have failed to require their suppliers to honor the university's patents.

Filament LED light bulbs are sometimes called "Edison" or "vintage" bulbs because they resemble light bulbs created by Thomas Edison that have glowing filaments visible inside. 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. The university said it was intended "to spearhead a broader, national response to the existential threat" posed by the "widespread disregard" for the patent rights of universities, including when schools encourage the private sector to develop commercial products containing their research.