NanoLumens [1] has filed patent infringement lawsuits PixelFLEX, of Nashville, Tennessee; InFiLED USA, of Marietta, Georgia; DetaiLED Solutions, of Marietta, Georgia; and Gable Company, of Baltimore, Maryland – all of whom, who we believe, import patent infringing LED from China.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages stemming from the companies’ infringement of four United States patents issued to NanoLumens.
We spoke to NanoLumens CEO Rick Cope last week at #infocomm17 and he told us that the decision to file suit in federal court was not undertaken lightly and follows repeated good faith efforts and multiple communications by NanoLumens to resolve its concerns with the four companies to create meaningful business relationships.
He went on record to say “NanoLumens has invested millions of dollars and man hours in the development of pioneering innovations that have been justly recognized by the United States Patent Office. Patent protected innovation is what makes the United States the leading innovator that it is. Failure to protect against patent infringement opens the door to the death of innovation and that is not something that this company will ever stand for.”
The lawsuits allege that PixelFLEX, InFiLED USA, DetaiLED, and Gable Company have, in one form or another, infringed upon US Patents 8,963,895 (Ubiquitously Mountable Image Display System), 9,159,707 (Flexible Display), and 9,640,516 (Flexible Display Apparatus and Methods), all of which are owned by NanoLumens. NanoLumens currently holds over a dozen United States Patents covering virtually every aspect of its flexible LED display design and engineering, with more patents pending.
Rick Cope emphasised “These four companies are benefitting from the use of NanoLumens’ proprietary technology that we have invested considerable time and resources in developing. Our intellectual property is the core of our company’s uniqueness and we will vigorously protect it.”
We understand that at Nanolumens, their vision of a universal modular display that can be built in any size, shape, curvature, or pixel density has been a real focus of. That in turn has led to numerous innovations, patents and patents pending covering key aspects of the technology portfolio that, collectively, deliver superb performance in the NanoLumens flexible Nixel™ display module – those patented features enable the NanoLumens Nixel™ display module to seamlessly tile and re-tile display surfaces, accept a wide continuum of changing curvatures and placements, and maintain pixel-to-pixel uniformity.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In the long term we expect the importing of patent infringing LED from China to be the end goal.