Legal fundraiser for defense against Way Too Cool UV flashlight patent

What really is a wavelength-transformation material? i understand about the photoelectric effect of UV on metals, but what is the physics of WT, or is there any? How does it compare with just a filter that blocks certain wavelengths?

The patent presents no mathematical theory, no physical theory, no examples, basically nothing other than this guys made-up theory that he can transform UV from one wavelength to another…?

Interesting rock photos at Engenious,

That’s definitely important advice for people involved in the suit. I’m not, but for my part, I’ll clarify what I mean by “patent troll”. Some use that term strictly for non-practicing entities, which WTC clearly isn’t (they sell UV flashlights with filters), while others use it less precisely, to refer to anyone they believe is misusing the patent system. I used it in the latter sense, though maybe I should say “patent bully” or “patent abuser” next time so there can be no confusion.

I’ve been pitchfork riled up about this since I first heard of it. I’ll explain in purely colloquial, common-sense terms why. The technicalities of patent law may differ from my interpretation, but I think anyone who exploits those technicalities in an offensive manner as WTC is doing is a jerk, and jerks deserve to be fed (metaphorically) to lawyers.

  • Sticking a visible light filter on a UV light that emits too much visible light is obvious to anyone who knows such filters exist. It was obvious to Gardner just as it would have been to Robert Williams Wood had someone shown him a UV flashlight in 1903 after his invention of Wood’s glass.
  • Using a wavelength-transforming phosphor on a UV light source, assuming such a phosphor already existed would also be obvious. That’s how fluorescent lights make white light, and both remote and on-chip phosphors over blue LEDs have been used to emit white light before the patent was filed.
  • The facts that the light is powered by a battery or the light source is a UV LED are irrelevant to the obviousness of putting a filter over it to remove unwanted purple.
  • The patent describes a variable filter, which have been commonly used for CMY mixing in entertainment lighting for decades. Using a gradient of material that passes UV instead of cyan, or even a variable concentration of quantum dots that fluoresce to produce a variable filter is also obvious.
  • The language of the patent is deliberately confusing. I’m neither a lawyer nor any other kind of expert on patents, but I’ve read a few. None have been nearly as hard to understand as this one.

Just copying from my above post to make sure I explain it better: The patent was originally filed to cover sheets of phosphor inserted over a UVC fluorescent light. The phosphor sheets would transform the 254nm wavelength to 312nm or 365nm. He subsequently got a patent for the same thing covering UV LEDs. Only later did he realize that the market for plain jane UVA lights would be big, without using the phosphor sheets to transform wavelengths. He got some twisted wording in the patent that allows him to make his current claims, IMHO without merit. His claim is that the filters get hot and emit IR – thus wave transformation.

A UVC fluorescent bulb has no phosphors inside. The bulb is clear and you see the mercury vapor that excites the phosphors on the white bulbs you are probably familiar with. The bulb is made of quartz so it passes the 254nm UVC. The patent refers to a phosphor sheet (teflon impregnated with phosphor powder) that is placed over the UVC bulb. The phosphor “glows” at a different wavelength (312nm MW UVB for example if that type phosphor is used) - this is the wave transformation.

In the photo of the rocks above you see a piece of tugtupite from Greenland. It has the unique property of responding to different wavelengths of UV light with different colors - red 254nm SW, pinkish 312nm MW, and salmon @ 365nm LW.

On reading realized I’m still not clear. Basics: all fluorescent bulbs work the same inside - mercury vapor with a peak of 254nm (UVC). In your typical fl bulb the inside is coated with a white phosphor. This phosphor glows in reaction to the UVC. The “color” it glows depends on how it is made. There are cool white phosphors, yellow phosphors, green, etc. There are also phosphors which glow in the UV range - 365nm UVA and 312nm UVB (and lots more in between). A bulb coated with a UV phosphor is usually made from UV transparent glass or quartz. THus the UV get out.
From this you can see that you can take a bulb which is not coated with any phosphors and illuminate a phosphor sheet outside the bulb. This sheet “transforms” the wavelength of the bulb.
Story the same for UV LEDs.
But a bandpass filter does not transform the wavelength, it just blocks visible light. His argument is that the filter gets hot, thus emitting IR - a “transformed” wavelength. Completely useless, silly, and obvious - in fact, unwanted. All glass in front of an LED does that.
Hope this helps….

I’m gonna go give you some reddit gold!!! Great analysis!

Hi Mark,

This really stinks that you and everyone affected on your side of the issue/lawsuit has to deal with this.

Like everyone else, I know virtually nothing about patent law, so I'm curious, when WTC filed for their patent, were you made aware and/or given an opportunity to contest the patent filing?

No, I have no idea how anyone would contest a patent, don’t know much about them. Just common sense and what I google ;-).

You don’t but if you have interest as a holder of another patent or related material then that will (should) come up in the search done before application. That’s another thing that should be done by an experienced attorney (or an IP firm at least) and can take months to do thoroughly. If something somehow slips through and you notice it later then you go through USPTO and work it that way. Someone who has no real standing…not sure how that might (or not) work but that’s all through USPTO, not the courts.

Bottom line will probably end up being that defendant was in violation, and if (as it appears) they did so knowingly and continued to do so knowingly, then they’ll get the hammer as those in previous cases did. The law may not be right or may not seem right, but as long as it’s the law then you need to follow it and work other ways for change. Basically the way our whole civil society is set up and supposed to work. The bad thing here is that it’s one of those cases where punitive costs are exponential if it’s proven that the act(s) were willful. Ignoring a demand letter or worse…that’s enough to make you end up paying 3-5 times more than what you might have initially. Ultimate responsibility is to research first, adapt to issues that come up (such as being made aware of a law/restriction)…….etc. As a business owner, manufacturer, producer….you fail at those things and you end up paying dearly unless someone chooses to be extra kind to you.

I do hope that if there’s something of merit that the examiner’s opinion and award can be challenged later in USPTO. One of the things that makes this a little extra difficult is the type of science/physics involved. Mistakes or misunderstandings can be made by the office, by the applicants, and even in past awards/literature/data that may erroneously form a base. Even complex mechanisms or parts of larger mechanical works are much easier to address, and for the most part so are all of the electronics involved these days. I’ll have to go back and sift through his stuff again but I’ve been under the impression that his award was based on something other than the mechanics everyone is focused on.

It sure would be nice for the free and creative flashlight market to be that way again totally. Just one more example of some bad apple squelching people for its own benefit and not really contributing anything to the tree…pretty much the same exact thing as I’ve seen before elsewhere and I was a little sad when I first learned of it and started reading the backstory and then docs in his other suits. Sometimes these kinds of guys get too much of a sense of pride to do the right thing, even if they don’t deserve what they think they have.

It appears to me that “Wavelength-Transformation” is a patent-obscuration term for what everyone else calls “Fluorescence”, in which a photon is emitted after an excited electron drops back down to the ground state energy level.

The wavelength of the emitted photon is always longer than that of the photon which caused the excitation (energy is always lost in the round-trip process). So why make up new terms like WT…

see the fluorescence wiki here: Fluorescence - Wikipedia

Typically fluorescence produces visible colored light but in this case he claims to be able to operate within the UV bands to produce non-visible UV fluorescence from UVC to UVB or UVA.

How could anyone distinguish between an optical filter that simply blocks or transmits certain frequencies versus his WT material?

How would a person test or prove that WT is the mechanism that has actually occurred?

Donate it to the fundraiser instead!

+1, buying reddit gold is just throwing money down the drain.

I have unlimited reddit gold. Don’t ask me how :wink: Plus, it supports a company I like

The wavelength of the emitted photon is always longer than that of the photon which caused the excitation (energy is always lost in the round-trip process). So why make up new terms like WT…

Yep - stokes law. In this case he’s using the property to “transform” UVC to UVB/UVA via phosphors. It is simple fluorescence, but wave transformation sounds so much cooler to him.

He doesn’t distinguish between a bandpass optical filter and a WT filter. Says they are the same because a bandpass filter gets hot and emits IR. While true, so does an ordinary glass lens. So ALL flashlights are violating his patent according to his analysis. Silly……

Test? all kinds of tests can be selectively made to detect IR, none valid IMHO

That’s just blackbody radiation.

Update? I see that your MTD was granted w/o prejudice. Is he going to refile with a more proper petition/complaint? Seems like such a waste of time and money for both sides thus far…as law often goes.

He refiled the same day. His lawyers were ready so they obviously knew the lawsuit would be dismissed. This third lawsuit also has a good chance of being dismissed as all he did was flesh it out with more BS, kinda like we did in high school to make our term papers the proper length (at least I did…). The defendants haven’t been served yet for the new lawsuit.
Updates are given on the funding page: https://gogetfunding.com/uvunited/

If this helps anything, the filter getting hot is not fluorescing, fluorescence has emission peaks defined by the molecular properties, IR being emitted is just blackbody radiation that is not the result of fluorescence but merely atoms/ molecules vibrating and its spectrum will be way broader, defined only by the (filter’s) temperature, not its material properties.

That said, maybe that’s why they call it wavelength transformation and not fluorescence.

Screw the patent system, it’s broken, toss it. Open source everything and compete in actual improvements to products and concepts. Today’s patents just seek to create stagnant monopolies and hinder progress.

This is why there is so much progress in consumer goods in China. Very few companies rely on patents and there is a very open source collaborative spirit in the electronics markets in places like Shenzhen. Of course, there is a patent system but small companies will rarely try to game the system in this way. They compete by coming first to market with innovative goods. Outside of China, people are missing out on high quality consumer products that they aren’t even aware of.

Large firms in the United States can still navigate the patent system effectively, but as it stands, the U.S. patent system stifles innovation at the small and medium firm level. I’ll give an example. A very broad CPU liquid design patent is owned by Asetek and so there is no way to bring a cooler to market without licensing the Asetek patent. However, the technology is well over a decade old and there is no good way to make a liquid cooler without this rather “common sense” design.

The world needs to come together eventually. So far it looks it might come later rather than sooner. But we’ll see.

Indeed. The west governments think that trying to force their patents on others is good for them….and considering that they have far more patents than the east, this is actually likely a winning short term strategy, even though others reasonably drag their feet when it comes to enforcement.
But long term it’s a disaster.

Doesn’t his patent troll only have 5 years left on it? I want to see him defeated in court but frankly… its not a profitable venture for anyone except the frivolous troll Bill Gardner

Really feel sorry for the people paying $40-60 too much for his UV convoys :frowning:

Speaking of stagnation, the graphene battery patents that Samsung holds are going to hurt us something awful for 20 years.