andre Posted February 4, 2009 Share Posted February 4, 2009 ghey. im content with my mh anyway Link to comment
cdelicath Posted February 4, 2009 Share Posted February 4, 2009 what ever happened to the term monopoly? If things keep going the way they are in this country we will have two lights to chose from: AND God forbid we have a little competition to keep costs down, people working and research and development moving along. Link to comment
Laura6686 Posted February 4, 2009 Share Posted February 4, 2009 wow, we have lots of patent lawyers on NR this afternoon. Maybe someday, but right now I am just a paralegal studying Patent Prosecution. This is an interesting post here.... Now know that I am in favor of patent law, because it helps safeguard ideas from being stolen therefore increasing the value of innovation so that more people will in-turn, be innovative. That being said I do not agree with individuals or corporations filing for patents that they do not intend to pursue. It's kind of like going out and registering the domain name www.glue.com or something to that effect for no reason other than selling it for a ridiculous amount later on. That being said check out Orbital's website here: http://www.orbitec.com/bioproducts.html and you might see that they do in-fact use LED's in bioproduction systems. Now it seems that they deal mostly in commercial/government segments and stay away from the consumer market segments. It's not that they don't intend on producing LED lights for marine systems, they just plan on doing it on a different level, say for food production or in a laboratory for growing medicinal species. I should also point out one of their main claims in the patent, that up until that point LED's had been used to 'enhance' marine lighting, but their "invention" is to use LED's as the means for actually 'growing' marine life. For that reason I don't think they can come after anyone using LED 'moonlights' as they're only for enhancement. Also, note that this is the only patent belonging to the company - http://www.patents.com/Orbital-Technologie...246433/company/ With regards to the issue of PFO lighting vs. Orbital Tech I would have to say that I'm siding with PFO, but that's because I'm biased and I don't really care what NASA is doing with LED's at the moment... I honestly don't consider PFO to be at fault here. They're not that big of company, and they probably just had an idea and ran with it... I'm sure they didn't go out and read every single patent containing the word "LED", because that would just be ridiculous for everyone to do when they think of something new. Consider also that Orbital Tech's patent is just as enforceable on any of us DIY'ers as on PFO because we are using the same setups as in the crappy schematics on their patent here: http://www.google.com/patents?id=mwWAAAAAE...ne+aquarium+LED To summarize: PFO is a great company (and they make great lights, I have one of their MH units), and I would personally hate to see it go out of business as I would any marine supply company because they cater to what I consider important. Whether or not LED's have a future in our fish tanks is dependent on US patent law and the associated courts & lawyers. I think that we as hobbyists do have a responsibility to speak out though... The power of special interest groups is amazing (some crazy people have done some really crazy stuff just by being persistent). Does anyone know if the US patent office has a place to send in complaints or comments? I'll look into that I suppose... Either way I think we should all follow this particular case closely. GREAT POST Link to comment
lakshwadeep Posted February 4, 2009 Share Posted February 4, 2009 ajmckay: if you clicked a few links from that orbitec page, you'll come to here: http://www.planet-llc.com/pages/sunbow/pages/apollo.htm For years PLANET has offered some of the most advanced LED lighting available for biological research. Expanding on this expertise, PLANET will be releasing a new LED lighting system for aquariums soon. Apollo LED Aquarium Lighting System The Apollo Aquarium lighting system provides up to twice the light output of other aquarium LED systems in a quiet, sleek, low profile design with no attached fans. Light in wavelengths of amber, green, blue and violet are included for proper growth of coral and other marine life while preventing algae in the tank. Other benefits include: Low noise and voltage at the light hood Long life with no expensive bulb changes No need for chillers, ballasts, reflectors, pressurized bulbs, mercury or other hazardous chemicals Extremely low radiant heat transferred to the tank Distributed light directly above the water for consistent light intensity to the tank The Apollo Aquarium lighting system attaches directly to 4 or 6 foot tanks, and allows easy tank access with hinged front and customizable rear panels. Each system includes light hoods, power supply unit, cables and connectors. Optional Features An optional controller is available that allows users complete customization of their tank lighting. Users can program a number of adjustable light periods, including sunrise, daylight, sunset, moonlight with lunar cycling, and cloud cover. Check back soon for design photographs and order information. Link to comment
ajmckay Posted February 4, 2009 Share Posted February 4, 2009 ajmckay: if you clicked a few links from that orbitec page, you'll come to here:http://www.planet-llc.com/pages/sunbow/pages/apollo.htm Cool, thanks for the info. (I must have been loopy from reading that patent). Of course this isn't Orbit, but rather Planet LLC, a "spin-off" company that attempts to bring Orbit's technology to consumers. That's all fine and dandy, but it honestly doesn't look like they've actually had any success with that. Their website claims that in "late summer 2007" they will be releasing the sunbow 2, yet in their store the only thing LED related you can buy is a $750 desk lamp... Lame. Additionally I am not convinced that Planet LLC will be able to develop a quality product that aquarists will actually purchase. I say that because they have a diversity of products and are therefore unable to specialize in LED aquarium lighting therefore the research will most likely be lacking. (Granted I could be wrong, I just don't feel like they deserve the benefit of the doubt just yet as I've never heard anything good about them from a 3rd party). Granted PFO didn't specialize in LED aquarium lighting, but they did specialize in lighting as a whole and they were just using the technology in different ways. As a hobbyist I could be confident in their ability to make a product that would suit my needs. Who knows if Planet LLC will be able or willing to do the tests and learn the requirements of marine species. Maybe they just hack something together and call it "NASA approved" ? I sincerely hope that's not the case, but only time will tell. Link to comment
cdelicath Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 So couldn't PFO just market the lights as freshwater or did i miss something. Link to comment
Nanoized Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 Why do I have a feeling I would never by a fixture from Orbitec? http://www.orbitec.com/LEDaquarium.html "ORBITEC's ability to launch its product line was delayed due to internal resource limitations and a challenge to its intellectual property. We take our intellectual property rights very seriously, and expect others to do so as well." My take is that these opportunist waited until the market matured a little before unleashing the lawsuits. I guess the capital from the lawsuits will cure their "internal resource limitations". The president claims to be an "avid aquarium enthusiast". (does his guppy tank qualify?) I wonder if he has ever been a constructive member on any salt water forum? Link to comment
stanlalee Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 thanks laks, I was wondering more along the lines of; did they inform customers? are they supporting the already sold units? PFO is has reg fixtures did they lay them off too? as far as I know companies like marine depot are honoring warranties on PFO equipment sold but what they have left in stock is all thats going to be available. basically before the story broke they were no longer going to be manufactering and offering ANY metal halide products which were pretty much their bread and butter. It made no sense why they would stop selling PFO metal halide ballast for example which wer VERY popular. makes more sense now. you cant sell if you cant pay employees to make it products. still with the popularity of PFO equipment its suprising all this would be neccessary to fight a single patent lawsuit so generic. BTW dont most patents have a lifespan at which point they expire anybody can copy it. I know for a fact pharmaceutical drugs its 15yrs. after that anybody can offer generic versions. I cant imagine it being that long for something like a led light fixture. Link to comment
supernip Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 Why do I have a feeling I would never by a fixture from Orbitec? http://www.orbitec.com/LEDaquarium.html "ORBITEC's ability to launch its product line was delayed due to internal resource limitations and a challenge to its intellectual property. We take our intellectual property rights very seriously, and expect others to do so as well." My take is that these opportunist waited until the market matured a little before unleashing the lawsuits. I guess the capital from the lawsuits will cure their "internal resource limitations". The president claims to be an "avid aquarium enthusiast". I wonder if he has ever been a constructive member on any salt water forum? he probably pulled a dick move and patented after he read about the ideas on the forums >=( lolz jk I got no idea how it started Link to comment
lakshwadeep Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 he probably pulled a dick move and patented after he read about the ideas on the forums >=( lolz jk I got no idea how it started haha, I was thinking the same thing. The whole controversy sounded like someone who heard of this from hobbyists or the hype during the solaris and other LED development. Link to comment
ajmckay Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 My e-mail to Orbit Technology: Greetings, As a concerned hobbyist I am just writing to first say thank you for publishing an official statement on your website, which cleared up some of the ideas floating around. I was wondering if you were also going to post a press release on your site indicating the scope and intentions of your lawsuit with PFO Aquatics. I read your patent filing and the complaint for patent infringement and I think that people excited about the advancement of the LED technology are afraid that innovation will stop because anyone who attempts to stick an LED on his aquarium is going to be sued. To address this your company needs to clearly state how your patent is going to affect the hobby as best you can. Will you be committed to advancing LED lighting through cooperative research, design, & engineering with other, perhaps more established companies in the aquarium lighting trade if need be, or are profits the motivating factor? If the former is true hobbyists need to be assured that the technology will continue to develop at a reasonable pace and that as a company Orbit is committed to the development of the hobby even if it means some sacrifices up front (i.e. minimal royalties to enhance product competition). Additionally, Planet LLC could use an update to the LED aquarium lighting website, which looks like it was updated about 2 years ago. I suggest you incorporate some news on your latest designs, including pricing, availability dateds and pertinent test data (such as Photosynthetically Active Radiation readings, power consumption, color temp range, etc.). My hope is that LED technology will flourish in the aquarium hobby and that Orbit can be responsible enough to make that happen sooner than later. Up to this point PFO Aquatics was the one coming out with the most innovative products, and people are just afraid that this lawsuit will be a major setback. I wrote this e-mail based on my own concerns, but do you think this reasonably encompasses the general sentiment? Why do you all care that Orbit has this particular patent? What are your concerns and what are your hopes? If you have a moment you might want to make Orbit aware of your opinion. Link to comment
solonavi Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 Interesting news. Wonder if the other companies that produce LED fixtures will be targeted soon. From my knowledge, SolarisOasis do produce LED Aquarium fixture (ABP5) and they also own many US Patent but mainly for Plants Growth. Cheers JC Link to comment
DirtMonkey Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 Taking a longer view, does it even matter who has the legal right in this case? Is everyone here in the USA? I am too, but it looks like some dollars will be heading to China when they start producing cheap LED light fixtures unencumbered by US patents. Everyone loses, even the poor Chinese living near or working at yet another uncontrolled polluting factory. Link to comment
Hans Dorn Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 Disgusting. Using a light source for lighting purposes shouldn't be patentable. Link to comment
evilc66 Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 Taking a longer view, does it even matter who has the legal right in this case? Is everyone here in the USA? I am too, but it looks like some dollars will be heading to China when they start producing cheap LED light fixtures unencumbered by US patents. Everyone loses, even the poor Chinese living near or working at yet another uncontrolled polluting factory. The problem here is that if the product that is built in China is imported into the US, Orbital can file for a ban on importation for the same reasons that they are going after PFO. Disgusting. Using a light source for lighting purposes shouldn't be patentable. I couldn't agree more. Link to comment
ajmckay Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 My e-mail to Orbit Technology: Greetings, As a concerned hobbyist I am just writing to first say thank you for publishing an official statement on your website, which cleared up some of the ideas floating around. I was wondering if you were also going to post a press release on your site indicating the scope and intentions of your lawsuit with PFO Aquatics. I read your patent filing and the complaint for patent infringement and I think that people excited about the advancement of the LED technology are afraid that innovation will stop because anyone who attempts to stick an LED on his aquarium is going to be sued. To address this your company needs to clearly state how your patent is going to affect the hobby as best you can. Will you be committed to advancing LED lighting through cooperative research, design, & engineering with other, perhaps more established companies in the aquarium lighting trade if need be, or are profits the motivating factor? If the former is true hobbyists need to be assured that the technology will continue to develop at a reasonable pace and that as a company Orbit is committed to the development of the hobby even if it means some sacrifices up front (i.e. minimal royalties to enhance product competition). Additionally, Planet LLC could use an update to the LED aquarium lighting website, which looks like it was updated about 2 years ago. I suggest you incorporate some news on your latest designs, including pricing, availability dateds and pertinent test data (such as Photosynthetically Active Radiation readings, power consumption, color temp range, etc.). My hope is that LED technology will flourish in the aquarium hobby and that Orbit can be responsible enough to make that happen sooner than later. Up to this point PFO Aquatics was the one coming out with the most innovative products, and people are just afraid that this lawsuit will be a major setback. I wrote this e-mail based on my own concerns, but do you think this reasonably encompasses the general sentiment? Why do you all care that Orbit has this particular patent? What are your concerns and what are your hopes? If you have a moment you might want to make Orbit aware of your opinion. Okay, last night I sent out an e-mail to Orbit (see above e-mail) and this morning I received a response. Read it below: Dear Aaron, Thank you for your very thoughtful email. It is much appreciated after some that I have received over the past two days. I would like nothing more than to release all of the information you are asking for, but I need to restrain many of the details due to the ongoing patent litigation. In general however, I would like to reinforce that ORBITEC is an expert in LED lighting for a number of applications (plant growth, algae growth, aerospace, controlled environments), and we have been trying since the inception of our patent in 2003 to work together with established aquarium lighting companies to partner and bring our products to market jointly. That has always been and continues to be our goal. We have entered a partnership with a well-known aquarium company, and look forward to the new products we are creating and designing as a team for release later this year. I also encourage you to read the patent (www.uspto.gov), #7,220,018 that is at the heart of this suit, and understand this is not a patent for the use of LEDs over an aquarium, but rather a specific system design with many elements. It is one of many patents pending or granted for LED aquarium lighting. Our patent very clearly does not cover moonlighting or many, many other types of LED lighting, so we do not see ourselves as a force to stifle good design, however we do take our intellectual property seriously and will stand behind our patent as needed. I do have a planned upgrade to the PLANET website ready to go when I get the OK from our partner, so I will save your email and let you know when that occurs. Please let me know if you have any other questions, and I will try my best to answer them. I'm going to have to say that my first impressions of Orbit may have been wrong. I think we can all appreciate good customer service and I'm impressed that this e-mail was a quick & reasonable response to my original message. The e-mail came from one of their department managers too. As far as Orbit's claims that they have been trying to work with other established aquarium companies is unknown at the moment, however, I am looking forward to the upcoming products that are scheduled to be released later this year. I hope that this reply also clarifies the fact that Orbit does not own a patent on LED lighting for aquariums, but only a specific design, which it seems PFO might have knowingly or unknowingly used for their Solaris & Gallileo units. I still support PFO as I own their MH units and they obviously were concerned with us hobbyists & our needs, but at the same time I don't think this patent lawsuit will result in the outsourcing of work to china or wherever or the demise of LED lighting on aquariums. On the contrary this might spur some new designs and hopefully increase the attention LED lighting gets in the aquarium industry; hopefully reducing prices and increasing efficiency at the same time. Link to comment
jeremai Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 Told you Orbitec wasn't the Big Bad. Aquarium folk are always a bunch of Chicken Littles about these sorts of things, lol. Link to comment
ccjung Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 I also encourage you to read the patent (www.uspto.gov), #7,220,018 that is at the heart of this suit, and understand this is not a patent for the use of LEDs over an aquarium, but rather a specific system design with many elements. It is one of many patents pending or granted for LED aquarium lighting. Our patent very clearly does not cover moonlighting or many, many other types of LED lighting, so we do not see ourselves as a force to stifle good design, however we do take our intellectual property seriously and will stand behind our patent as needed. The problem is that one of their claims is too broad to be interpreted as not trying to stifle good design, namely their claim of spatial and spectral control of the LEDs. Replace LEDs with Incandescent, CF, MH, Plasma, lighting technology, and you can see that their attempt to patent LEDs that are "spectrally and spatially" controllable has no merit, since we've been spatially and spectrally controlling our existing lighting systems since the dawn of the timer. What happens when other solid state lighting technolgy emerges? Should I be the first to patent quantum light emitting technology for the aquarium using spectral and spatial control? One of the biggest benefits to the adaptation of LED technology to the Aquarium environment is the fact that their component spectra can be modulated to deliver the type of light our specimens require or thrive on. WIthout this ability, LEDs for our hobby are nearly useless. Link to comment
evilc66 Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 The other issue with their claim is that they clearly state that the patent is to include the use of LEDs to sustain mairine life. This is out of the claims section of the patent listed above: 10. A method of lighting a marine habitat for marine growth comprising: providing a housing with a LED light source mounted thereto; providing a power source for driving said LED light source; controlling the illumination of said LED light source at a level sufficient to support marine growth. It's the derived end use for the technology. Link to comment
Wells Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 It seems this has to do more with the violation of Intellectual Property Rights. To file and register Intellectual Rights is an incredibly costly venture. Probably 10x that of filing for a patent. The cost of litigation alone by the filer is immense. For Orbitec to pursue this, someone had to really piss them off. If the cost of the litigation was in the six figure range(which I am sure it is), they would need seven figures plus in sales just to break even. This is before even one fixture in manufactured. They could not pull this cost from PFO, you can't get blood from a stone. I would venture to assume, the designer of the PFO LED Lighting at some point had prior design knowledge of the Orbitec system. There is absolutely no other reason to pursue this matter in court. If you change a design by 10%, the patent is void. intellectual Property Right is a whole other story. I am telling you, there is something here we all do not know. Link to comment
coolwaters Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 w8 no one patent the idea of using LEDs for aquariums? im still a little confused about this wats going on? Link to comment
Wells Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 It seems it has more to do with the controller for the LED Lights. There has to be a lot more here. Litigation costs for a product that has a small retail market is really hard to fathom. Link to comment
evilc66 Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 The controller is only part of it. It repeatedly mentions the use for the light for the support of marine life. Link to comment
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