Nichia and Nakamura settle for only $8m
Blue LED pioneer Shuji Nakamura and his former employer Nichia are both said to be dissatisfied after the Tokyo High Court told the company to pay Nakamura ¥840 million ($8.1 million) to settle the pair's extended patent dispute.
Although this sum is thought to be the most that a company has ever agreed to pay an inventor in Japan, it is far less than the ¥20 billion figure that Nakamura had originally sued for, and which he was awarded by the Tokyo District Court in January 2004.
A payment of even that magnitude is unlikely to have financially crippled Nichia, which has a huge share of the estimated $4 billion high-brightness LED market and is now gearing up for mass production of GaN-based blue lasers for next-generation DVD applications.
Nichia Corporation had been expecting to make a ¥100 billion profit on sales of ¥220 billion in 2004.
According to a report at Nikkei.net, the High Court decision estimated all Nakamura's inventions while the researcher was at Nichia to be worth ¥608 million to the company. The extra ¥230 million is compensation for delayed payment.
Nakamura is said to be "totally dissatisfied" with the settlement, while Nichia believes even the revised amount to be excessive.
Now working as a professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Nakamura had sued Nichia on the basis that his work was worth 50% of the value of the invention.
The final settlement appears to have valued Nakamura's contribution to be far less than that.
