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How Amusing: Now Boston University's Suing Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung

This article is more than 10 years old.

The amusement is that it was also Boston University which released the report in which they claimed that patent trolling was costing the US economy as much as $29 billion a year.

Boston University, which last year assessed the cost of “patent trolling” in the American economy at $US29 billion, has fired its litigation gun at a slew of tech companies – including Apple .

Since October 2012 – incidentally the month in which its cost-of-trolling research was released – the university has been filing lawsuits centred around the semiconductor technology used to make LEDs.

Among its targets are Apple's iPhone and iPad, Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite and Fire, Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 and Chromebook.

This is just another reminder that there's no such thing as "patent trolling" and then another completely independent and different thing called "patent assertion". There's a spectrum and while we might be able to identify the extremes of said spectrum easily enough the real problem is, as always, in deciding where the difference is in the middle. Classically this is described as a Sorites Paradox. If we've a pile of grain and we take one grain away we've still got a pile of grain. And also it's true that our one single grain, sitting all alone, is not a pile. But at some point in the transfer of grains from the pile to the other place, we end up with two piles. And at some further point, before the complete exhaustion of that first pile, we would say that there's again only one pile and, well, some few grains upon the ground.

We can identify the extremes of patent trolling: we can see obvious cases of just and righteous patent assertion. But where's the dividing line between the two?

Anyway, amusement over, the University is actually asking for a ban on the importation of all offending products:

How do college students feel about this one? The powers that be at Boston University want a federal court to ban the sale of a wide range of Apple products — including the iPhone 5, the iPad and the MacBook Air — because they allegedly infringe a patent issued to one of its professors in 1997.

In a complaint filed this week in the Massachusetts federal court, the trustees of BU say the Apple products contain a “gallium nitride thin film semiconductor device” that is still under patent protection. Professor Theodore Moustakas applied for the patent in 1995, which means it is set to expire in 2015. Here’s an image from the patent, which describes the use of nitrogen to prepare a type of film that is “a potential source of inexpensive and compact solid-state blue lasers:”

That work done on GaN in the 90s has indeed been very important. I know little about this specific patent but do recall the excitement which was coursing through the field at that time (back then it was largely about the wavelength that "blue" lasers provided and thus the greater density of information that could be packed onto an optical read write disc). The really interesting question though is why are these electronics firms being targeted? None of them (well, maybe Samsung does but the others certainly don't) actually build the semiconductor lasers that go into their products. They'd almost certainly be entirely unaware of what methods were used to produce them. So why try suing them?

The answer is, OK, to be more accurate my assumption about what the answer is, that Boston University didn't paper the world with applications for this patent. The US, yes, they might have tried Japan and some European countries. But back then you didn't really bother with patent applications worldwide. The costs of the applications would have been too high for the potential revenues. If something this high tech came into general use then it would be in one of those three territories and money could be made that way. The implication of this is that it's entirely legal for anyone who wants to to make these lasers this way in, say, China, S Korea or Taiwan. Which is, as we know, where a lot of such electronics does get made these days. It's also entirely legal to sell equipment containing such lasers in countries where there is no patent.

There is only a restriction on importing equipment containing these patented devices into a country where there is a valid patent. Thus the suing of not the manufacturers (largely Hon Hai, or Foxconn, here), nor even of the component manufacturers, but of the importers of the offending goods.