Ceravision, a company that is based in the United Kingdom has decided to sue Luxim to protect their Intellectual Property. The two companies are scheduled to go to trial in both the United States and in the UK. What is all the fuss about? “Both disputes relate to technologies developed during a joint venture partnership between Ceravision Limited and Digital Reflection Inc (DRI) in 1999. Ceravision partnered with DRI to bring its ceramics expertise to DRI’s light source technologies. Ceravision’s first patent filing in this field (now granted US patent number 6,666,739) dates back to December 1999, many months before the creation of Luxim. As described in Ceravision’s High Court pleadings, Luxim’s founders signed a consultancy agreement in April 2000 to provide engineering support to DRI. As further detailed in its US and UK filings, after being paid in excess of US$230,000 by DRI during a four-month period, and having information disclosed to them under a Non Disclosure Agreement, the Luxim founders filed the disputed patent application covering aspects of the work previously conceived of by DRI.” In 2004, Ceravision purchased DRI’s assets to get the technology that it jointly developed in conjunction with DRI. We don’t have an exact court date of when this whole thing is to get started, but expect this to last a couple of years in litigation. Luxim currently provides the high intensity LIFI plasma arc light component of the Seashine plasma light.
Update: Looks like we received an old press release and Luxim and Ceravision settled their dispute to the satisfaction of both parties on March 13th 2009.
