WEST CALDWELL, N.J. — MaxLite has filed an additional petition for inter partes review (“IPR”) before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) seeking to invalidate U.S. Patent No. 9,807,826 (“’826 patent”), owned by Jiaxing Super Lighting Electric Appliance Co., Ltd. (“Jiaxing Super Lighting”), a Chinese contract manufacturer based in the city of Jiaxing, located in Zhejiang province.
This IPR is in addition to the two that were filed last month by MaxLite to invalidate Jiaxing Super Lighting’s 9,897,265 (“‘265 patent”) and 9,723,662 (“‘662 patent”) patents.
Like the ‘265 and ‘662 patents, the patent that is the subject of the new petition is part of Jiaxing Super Lighting’s recently announced patent licensing program for LED tube lamps. According to the petition, the ‘826 patents should never have been issued in light of prior art known at the time the application leading to the ‘826 patent was filed.
“MaxLite does not tolerate destructive litigation,” said President and Chief Operating Officer Spencer Bolgard. “We will not allow our company, our customers, nor the industry to be wronged by Jiaxing Super Lighting and its baseless patent assertions.”
The ‘826 patent is directed to an LED tube lamp that is configured to replace fluorescent lamps. Such retrofit LED tube lamps were well known in the art at the time that Jiaxing Superlighting filed its ‘826 patent application. The ‘826 patent claims allow an LED tube lamp to work with different power sources, for example either a high-frequency power source or a low-frequency power source, by using a switching circuit that chooses between different driving states depending on the power source. This improvement over typical retrofit LED tube lamps was also known in the art at the time of the alleged invention.
Therefore the ‘826 patent, like the ‘265 and ‘662 patents should never have been issued by the USPTO.
“We encourage all lighting companies which have been approached by Jiaxing Super Lighting to review our IPRs and determine for yourselves whether you are willing to be bullied by Jiaxing Super Lighting into signing up for, and legitimizing, their patent license program,“ said MaxLite General Counsel Zvi Raskin. “All three IPRs filed to date are available for viewing, as will be those that MaxLite intends to file against Jiaxing Super Lighting in the upcoming weeks and months, on the PTAB website.”
The URL for the PTAB website is https://ptab.uspto.gov/#/login. (No login is required; enter “MaxLite” into the “Party Name” field and click “Search.”)
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