chapter12

Nichia's chairman, Nobuo Ogawa, was determined not to license to other companies the high-brightness LED technology that Shuji Nakamura had developed. His policy went counter to the semiconductor industry's long-established practice of cross-licensing. The basis for this practice was mutual self-interest. In a field where so many bright minds were at work, no one company could hope to maintain a monopoly on intellectual property. (And regulatory bodies like the US Federal Trade Commission would take a dim view if they tried.) Cross-licensing made sense because it meant that firms did not have to waste vast amounts of time and money in court fighting lengthy legal battles. Even companies such as Texas Instruments, which held basic patents on the microchip itself, was prepared to cross-license those patents—for a price. But although Nichia could undoubtedly have made a mint from license fees, from the start the firm flat out refused even to consider the option.

There were several reasons for this no-license policy. One was altruistic: old man Ogawa had always wanted to provide jobs for the good people of Tokushima, historically one of the poorest parts of Japan. Manufacturing LEDs represented an unprecedented opportunity to boost local employment, with the company increasing its payroll manyfold. (By 2005 Nichia was employing some thirty-five hundred people, up from just seven hundred ten years earlier.) Another was fear: Nichia was a small company. Licensing its technology to much bigger rivals could be very risky. With better access to capital, such competitors would find it easier to make massive investments in production capacity and marketing manpower. Nichia might be overwhelmed. A third reason, which Nakamura explained to me, was very Japanese: licensing was too easy an option. In the long run, it would make the company soft. Better that they should earn their profit the old-fashioned way, by making and selling products themselves. Such a course would ensure Nichia's long-term prosperity, even if that did mean behaving like a monopolist.

Adopting such a hard-line attitude was unheard of in harmony-loving, consensus-seeking Japan. Nichia's litigious approach to all-comers would ultimately end up pitting the company against its most famous former employee in what may turn out to be one of the most important court cases in Japanese corporate legal history.

Nichia's campaign to protect its precious intellectual property had begun in August 1996. In the Tokyo District Court, the company filed a lawsuit against Toyoda Gosei—Isamu Akasaki's commercial partner—which had recently commenced shipping double-heterostructure gallium nitride blue LEDs. Claiming that the Nagoya-based firm had infringed its LED patents, Nichia demanded that its rival halt shipments and pay damages of approximately $5.5 million. The following year, Toyoda Gosei responded with a counterclaim. In 1998 Nichia launched a legal barrage, consisting of a further five suits. Once again Toyoda Gosei responded in kind. A spokesperson for Nichia described the conflict as “developing into an all-out war.”

Sumio Shinagawa, an attorney representing Nichia, saw the battle as one of the most complex patent-related disputes ever conducted in Japan. Such disputes were mostly settled simply by the infringing company agreeing to pay a licensing fee. In this case, however, Nichia had no intention of negotiating an agreement. Since its patents related to pn-junction-type LEDs, whereas Toyoda Gosei's intellectual property was mostly related to obsolete MIS devices, Nichia had the upper hand. The company refused to consider Toyoda Gosei's reconciliatory proposals aimed at setting up a cross-licensing deal.

This first battle was one that Nichia would win. In August 2000 the court ruled that Toyoda Gosei had indeed infringed Nichia's patent. It ordered the Nagoya-based company to stop manufacturing the offending device and to pay Nichia approximately $900,000 in damages. (Toyoda Gosei appealed the judgment, and the case dragged on until a settlement was finally reached in September 2002.)

Nichia's next campaign would be a very different story. The first salvo was fired in December 1999, when the company sued Sumitomo Corporation, the Japanese distributor for Cree, again in the Tokyo District Court. Charging patent infringement, Nichia demanded that Sumitomo stop selling blue LEDs in Japan. Cree intervened on behalf of its distributor, taking over the defense of the case. In April 2000 Nichia brought two additional patent infringement lawsuits against Sumitomo.

Then things got complicated. In May 2000 Cree acquired a company called Nitres. This was a start-up founded in 1996 by Steve DenBaars and Umesh Mishra of the University of California at Santa Barbara to develop high-brightness gallium nitride LEDs. The company's primary focus was ultraviolet light emitters. It employed around twenty-seven people, mostly former students and technicians from UCSB. Its facilities were located at a business park adjacent to the university. Following its acquisition, the company was renamed Cree Lighting. The new subsidiary's charter was to do medium-term—meaning six months to one year—development work for the parent company.

In late September 2000 Cree and North Carolina State University retaliated against Nichia by filing a lawsuit in the Eastern District Court of North Carolina. This suit sought an injunction on sales of Nichia's blue-violet laser in the United States. Then, in early November, Cree dropped a bombshell. The company announced that it was hiring Shuji Nakamura to work as a part-time consultant at Cree Lighting. At the same time, Cree moved to strengthen its ties with UCSB by pledging $1.2 million to fund an endowed chair to be known as the Cree Chair in Solid-State Lighting and Displays. The company also threw in another million dollars to fund research at the university. There were no strings attached to this money: Cree would not receive any rights to technology developed as a result of the donation. The following year, Nakamura was named as the inaugural recipient of the chair.

In the United States, it is of course common for professors to consult for companies. Indeed, some schools—MIT, for example—virtually require that faculty spend one day a week working in industry. This is seen as healthy, a way of avoiding the ivory-tower syndrome, of making sure that research does not drift too far from the requirements of the society that, one way or another, is paying for it. If intellectual property results from this mutually beneficial interaction, then so much the better (as long as the university gets its cut). Professors becoming rich is not seen as an undesirable outcome. In Nakamura's case, it was quite natural that he should consult one day a week for Cree Lighting. After all, the company had been founded by his friends, and it was staffed by their former students. Besides, where else in Santa Barbara was he going to consult?

In Japan, by contrast, the ties between academe and industry are far less intimate. For one thing, there is the issue of turf. Universities are the jealously guarded province of Japan's education ministry, which pays professors’ salaries. The bureaucrats see no reason why academics should supplement their incomes by consulting for companies, which come under the jurisdiction of a rival ministry. Accordingly, they spin a web of red tape to discourage cooperation. A second barrier is cultural. There is a strong feeling among the Japanese that academics should not sully their lily-white hands through overly close contact with grubby industry. They should do only academic research.

From an American perspective, Nakamura was doing nothing out of the ordinary. From a Japanese one, it was unexpected that a professor should do work for a company. But the worst thing, from Nichia's point of view, was that their former star employee was apparently now consorting with the enemy, their archrival, Cree, the outfit that only the previous month had filed suit against them.

On December 27, 2000, a year to the day after Nakamura's resignation, Nichia filed a counterclaim against Cree and NCSU in the Eastern District Court of North Carolina, alleging infringement of four US patents on gallium nitride light emitters. In addition, the suit cited Nakamura, accusing him of leaking trade secrets to archrival Cree. In a cruel twist of fate, the very outcome that Shuji had joined the faculty of UCSB in order to avoid had come to pass.

In May 2001, the Tokyo District Court dismissed the first of the Nichia suits against Sumitomo Corporation and Cree. This came as no surprise to Shiro Shinagawa, Nichia's patent attorney, because, as he told Nikkei Business, “Cree has a trump card named Shuji Nakamura, the inventor of Nichia's blue LED.” The structure of Cree's device differed from that of Nichia. (And, as Cree chairman Neal Hunter never tired of telling people, their devices were based on silicon carbide.) But Cree had also found another stick with which to beat Nichia. It turned out that Shuji Nakamura had not been the first to patent a gallium nitride buffer layer, one of the key steps in making bright blue LEDs. In 1991, just one week before Nakamura filed for his patent, Ted Moustakas of Boston University filed a similar application. Cree would subsequently take out an exclusive license on Moustakas's US patent, which was granted in 1997. Based on this patent, in May 2001, Cree counterattacked, filing an infringement suit against Nichia and Nichia America.

The Nakamura patents, which some in Japan had referred to as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” had been torpedoed. The company's monopoly on bright blue LEDs was taking on water fast. In December 2001 the Tokyo court dismissed Nichia's other two claims against Sumitomo and Cree.

Eventually, in November 2002, Nichia would concede and do what it vowed it would never do. The company entered a comprehensive patent cross-license agreement with Cree (also with Toyoda Gosei and the remaining two of the “Big Five” gallium nitride LED makers, LumiLEDs and the German firm, Osram Opto). The long drawn-out legal battle had been, as Cree's John Edmond put it, with characteristic bluntness, “a pain in the ass. Just a huge waste of time and effort, and funds.” At the height of the disputes Cree was spending, it was said, a million dollars a month on intellectual property-related legal issues. “In the end,” Edmond said, “we just came together and said, Hey, you do what you do, we do what we do, and we'll just cross-license everything.” But that was by no means the end of the legal matters.

In Nichia's case against Nakamura, the company contended that Shuji was still bound by a nondisclosure agreement he signed when he joined Nichia in 1979. The suit asserted that Cree had hired him to gain access to knowledge he had accumulated while working at Nichia. The main evidence for this assertion was some e-mails that Shuji had “secretly” sent to John Edmond in late 1999, when he was considering whether to join Cree. Nichia claimed that in these e-mails Nakamura had promised Edmond that he would show Cree how to get around Nichia's patent wall.

Nakamura responded that all he had done was to voice his concern over whether there would be a legal problem with patents if he joined Cree. There was no question of him divulging Nichia's trade secrets to a rival. Nakamura's US lawyer, William McLean, referred to the case as “a spite suit,” an attempt to punish Nakamura for what Nichia saw as his treachery.

US courts, unlike their Japanese counterparts, have a process known as “discovery.” It obliges the parties in a legal case to disclose pertinent information. Under this process, all e-mails were revealed. If there had been anything incriminating in them, Nakamura would have lost the case, been fined, perhaps even sent to prison. Instead, he was completely exonerated. In October 2002 Nichia's allegations of trade secret theft were found to be baseless and the suit was dismissed. But the court took almost two years to reach this decision. For Shuji, it was all a massive waste of time involving lengthy depositions, cross-country trips for appearances in court to give evidence, and seemingly endless consultations with lawyers. In addition to which, there were some nasty moments, like when he was accused of perjury, an assertion that was quickly determined to be false.

The allegation that he had leaked trade secrets to Cree enraged Shuji. Despite Nichia's mean-spirited refusal to pay him the retirement money they owed him, Nakamura had been content to let bygones be bygones. But his former employer had come after him aggressively. Shuji decided he would retaliate by fighting fire with fire. On August 23, 2001, he filed a claim in Tokyo District Court asking for compensation of 2 billion yen (around $16.5 million) as his fair share of the $1.4 billion in sales that Nichia had thus far earned based on the technology he had developed.

“I had no intention of filing a suit against Nichia when I quit the company,” Shuji told Yoshiko Hara of Electronic Engineering Times. “All my hope was to start a new research life from square one in the United States. But Nichia's action [i.e., in bringing the trade secrets suit] was a hindrance to my work. It was nothing other than noise. It made me angry and I decided to file a suit from my side.” As one Japanese commentator put it sagely, “One cannot help but think that Nichia [now] lies on a bed of its own making.”

For an inventor to file suit for fair reward is not uncommon. But Nakamura's petition also contained a most unusual demand. Namely, that 80 percent of the rights to the key patent he filed while at Nichia should be returned to the inventor, i.e., him. The Japanese patent in question, number 2,628,404—usually abbreviated “404”—covered two-flow MOCVD, the novel crystal growth system that Shuji had used to make all of his blue LED and laser breakthroughs. The petition also pointed out that Nakamura had developed gallium nitride LEDs against the instructions of Nichia's management, which had ordered him to stop the work. He had applied for patents secretly, without Nichia's knowledge. They were thus the result of his initiative rather than the company's requirements.

Nakamura said he was claiming the rights in order to make them available for wider use by other manufacturers. “If Nichia had not monopolized the patents, the blue LED market would have grown ten times larger than it is today,” Shuji told Hara. “LEDs are energy- and resource-saving devices, but Nichia has stunted their healthy growth.” This was radical stuff.

Fighting the suit on his behalf in the Tokyo court was a maverick lawyer named Hidetoshi Masunaga. His goal was not merely to win his client's case. Rather, Masunaga wanted to force a revision of Japan's ambiguous patent law, to bring it in line with the American model. Article 35 of the US patent law stipulates that employees are entitled to receive “adequate compensation” for their patented research. Japanese researchers typically do not have contracts with detailed provisions for rewards. In the United States, researchers’ rights are clearly stated in their employment contracts. The greater the contribution of the employee, the larger his share of the earnings. In theory, at least.

In Japan it is entirely up the company how much an individual inventor should be compensated. For each of the one hundred and ninety-plus Japanese patents he had filed, Shuji had received ten thousand yen (less than one hundred dollars) on application and another ten thousand yen on granting. Dispensing such paltry amounts regardless of the commercial consequences of the innovations they related to was standard practice among Japanese companies.

Much more than money was at stake here. At a time when Japan's economy was in the doldrums, the need to stimulate innovation—hence, product development—was urgent. Nakamura's point was that the nation's prosperity depended in large measure on the talent of its innovative engineers. By failing to reward such people adequately, Japan risked losing its technological edge, as the best and the brightest increasingly left to find jobs overseas. In filing such a suit against his former employer, Nakamura felt he was striking a blow on behalf of all Japanese corporate researchers. His action sent shock waves through Japanese industry, especially among senior management and corporate apparatchiks responsible for handling intellectual property. By daring to challenge the status quo, by questioning the wisdom of absolute loyalty to the company, Nakamura emboldened others to assert their rights as individual inventors.

In response, researchers filed a rash of multimillion-dollar suits against giant corporations such as Hitachi, Toshiba, and Ajinomoto for compensation for inventions relating to optical discs, flash memory, and artificial sweeteners. Needless to say, corporate Japan thought that this kind of thing was outrageous. “Product innovation cannot be created by one person,” spluttered Toshiba chairman Taizo Nishimuro. It was the joint effort of the corporation and its employees that made products possible. Ultimately, however, Nakamura's bold action would force many Japanese companies, including industry leaders like NEC and Honda, to rethink their remuneration policies regarding innovation.

In September 2002 the Tokyo court rejected Shuji's attempt to win the rights to his patents, ruling that a tacit contract obtained between the parties under which Nakamura gave ownership of his inventions to Nichia. At the same time, however, the court determined that Nakamura was eligible for monetary compensation based on the amount of profit generated by the intellectual property for which he was responsible. The only question now was, How much?

Regardless of their outcome, court cases can be bad publicity for those involved. This is especially true in Japan, where it is felt that if a case goes to court, then both the plaintiff and the defendant are to blame. Participants thus acquire a certain notoriety. This can have unfortunate ramifications. For example, when Shuji moved to the United States, NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, produced a ninety-minute TV program about him going to UCSB and the kind of research he intended to conduct there. The documentary was completed about a week before Nakamura filed his suit against Nichia. Following the announcement that he had taken legal action, the program was hurriedly canceled.

Rather than have their good names dragged through the mud of a public trial, most Japanese would much rather settle matters out of court. While Nichia was suing Nakamura for leaking trade secrets and Nakamura was suing Nichia for adequate compensation, in an attempt to limit the damage, efforts were made to reach a settlement.

At UCSB, Shuji and his colleagues had established the Solid-State Lighting and Display Center. Seven companies, most of them Japanese with Cree being the only US member, contributed funds to the center. In return, the firms could each send a researcher to work at the university and get first crack at licensing intellectual property. Now, as a gesture of goodwill, Nakamura decided to invite Nichia to join the center. He called his former company's headquarters to make the invitation personally. What ensued was a near-farcical failure to communicate.

“First I talked to the manager of Nichia's patent division. He said, I can't make that decision. You'll have to talk directly to the president [i.e., Eiji Ogawa]. So I called the president's office, and a woman answered. She asked me to wait a moment while she asked the president. I waited two or three minutes, then she came back and said, ‘The president's not here.’ I waited a few minutes, then I called back and the same thing happened. Then I called the patent division manager again, and he gave me the president's home number. I called the number and his wife answered. I asked to speak to her husband. ‘Is that Mr. Tanaka?’ she asked me, and of course I didn't tell her who I was. She asked me to wait. Then, after two or three minutes, she came back and said, ‘My husband's not here.’ So after that, I gave up.”

Being the high-profile protagonist of a cause célèbre inevitably made Shuji a media star in Japan. Newspapers and magazines solicited his opinions, not just on his area of expertise, but also on general topics. Nakamura was prepared to speak out with characteristic frankness from his vantage point outside Japan about what he felt was wrong with his native land. In a country that is unusually prone to navel-gazing, such outspokenness made his columns and op-ed pieces compelling reading. Shuji the rebel technologist became Shuji the social commentator. He would frequently rail against the shortcomings of the Japanese education system. In particular, the pressures put on young people to cram for university entrance exams. These he mocked as being little more than memory tests, “ultra-quizzes,” in his word, that left would-be students feeling listless and worn-out. In his view, the system stymied the growth of the individual. It produced salarymen with a sheepish mentality who lacked confidence in their own abilities and who slavishly obeyed the instructions of their companies. “Japan is a good country to live in for those with no ambition,” was his conclusion.

Meantime, in court, Nichia was doing everything in its power to portray Nakamura in a bad light. As evidence against him, company employees introduced expert opinion letters in which they asserted that Nakamura had only been one member of a team, that he had not personally been responsible for much. Mostly, these letters were from employees who had joined Nichia after Nakamura's departure to the United States. But there were also some written by Nakamura's former juniors at the company. It was hard for Shuji to read such words by his most trusted associates, whom he had mentored early in their careers. But he understood that they were only doing so under duress. Through his contacts at the company Nakamura heard that Nichia's president had warned these employees that, if they did not toe the company line, they would be fired. With families to support, and little chance of finding other employment in Tokushima, they were forced to comply.

Hoping to dig up some dirt, Nichia even resorted to hiring private investigators to spy on Nakamura. Warned by UCSB's lawyers that he was under surveillance, Shuji became paranoid, worrying that his phone might be bugged and imagining that someone might be tailing him. He claimed that the investigators secretly recorded and videotaped him at work and even in his private life.

Nichia also attempted to dredge up the by-then-refuted allegations that Nakamura had leaked trade secrets to Cree. However, since this matter was entirely unrelated to the current case, the strategy backfired. The presiding judge, Ryoichi Mimura, was irritated by the mention of irrelevant issues.

On January 30, 2004, Mimura awarded Shuji a total of 20 billion yen ($190 million) in compensation. It was by far the largest award of its kind ever made by a Japanese court. The judge commented that Nakamura deserved such a large sum because “the invention was a rare example of a world-class invention achieved by the inventor's unique ability and unique ideas in a poor research environment at a small company.”

The court arrived at the staggering figure of 20 billion yen based first on an estimate of the company's sales of blue LEDs from 1994, when the devices went on sale, to 2010. The total sales figure was assessed at 1.2 trillion yen ($11.4 billion). Second, the court estimated that if Nichia had licensed its patent portfolio to other companies, these rivals would have generated an additional 600 billion yen by the year 2010. Assuming patent royalties of at least 20 percent, the court said that by attempting to retain its monopoly on the bright blue LED market, Nichia had forgone 120 billion yen ($1.14 billion) in royalty payments. The judge also ruled that Nakamura's contribution was “not less than 50 percent,” adding that his patents “had made possible the commercialization of [bright] blue LEDs.” Nakamura was pleased that his contribution had been recognized. “This ruling will increase the incentive for researchers to invent,” he commented, “and companies will profit from it over the long run as well.”

Nichia immediately appealed the ruling, arguing that the judgment failed to assess the contributions of the company and its other researchers. Now, as the case made its way to the appeals court, Nichia initiated hostilities on a new front, attempting to besmirch Nakamura's reputation in the court of public opinion. In the summer of 2004, a book was published in Japanese- and English-language editions. The title of the English edition was Blue Light Emitting Diode: Invented by Nichia Corporation and Its Young Engineers. The anonymous authors of this woeful attempt at a hatchet job are listed as “Themis Editorial Department,” Themis being an obscure Tokyo-based publisher (and, in Greek mythology, the goddess of justice, no doubt an intentional reference).

The preface makes perfectly clear the book's intent and its sponsor. The media were biased, reporting only one side—i.e., Shuji's—of the blue LED story. Now it was time to tell “the truth” about who was really responsible: “Behind [Nichia's] research and development of the blue light emitting diode lies President Eiji Ogawa's bold decision. He went against the opposition of those around him and came up with the necessary funding by even taking out a mortgage on his own house to give the project full support.” Under the “strong guidance” of Ogawa, the invention and the success of the blue light emitting diode were “the fruits of the hard-working efforts of Nichia Corporation and its young engineers.”

The book is in fact a Stalinesque attempt to airbrush Shuji out of the picture, to take away the credit for his achievements. The authors contend that Nakamura was “involved in the development of the blue LED as a member of the technical staff.” This is like saying that Lance Armstrong was involved in the winning of the Tour de France as a member of the US Postal Service cycling team. It ignores the fact that breakthroughs are typically made by individuals, not by consensus.

The book accuses Shuji of being primarily interested in making money. Also, of having been un-Japanese for claiming inventions as his own rather than as the product of group efforts. And, of being a traitor to Japan, by working “for the United States.” Though many of the allegations the book makes are demonstrably ludicrous, they have unfortunately gained some credence among people who do not know Nakamura, and hence, have done some damage to his reputation. It is therefore necessary to refute some of the most egregious assertions.

For example, the book claims that the annealing method of making positive-type gallium nitride was invented not by Nakamura but by two of his juniors. Nakamura had taken their research results, passing them off as his own. Given that both of the juniors were recent hires, one of them having joined the company only about six months prior to the breakthrough, this is hard to swallow. According to Nakamura: “I instructed them to do the annealing, and they did it under my guidance. They were just technicians doing what they were told to do. That's all there is to it.”

To clarify matters, I asked John Edmond of Cree for his assessment. Of course it can be argued that, since Nakamura now has close connections with Cree, Edmond's judgment may be biased. Nonetheless, since his career in many respects parallels that of Nakamura, and since he has known Shuji for many years, it seems to me that Edmond is eminently well qualified to comment on Nakamura's contribution.

“Shuji was key, because he did the initial work. After that, he did go to a lot of conferences, but probably as he was gallivanting around he'd pick something up and bring it back and say, OK, guys, let's try this and this and this—let's go make it happen. I guarantee he was involved in the experiments, because I know how I was involved—and I went to a lot of conferences, too. You can't not be involved, you've got to be involved. I mean, I think Shuji had the most knowledge of what had to happen next. And I guarantee that he had most of the good ideas. Did he have all the ideas? No. I don't have all the ideas. There are several good people in our group. But I think he had the good leadership, to push it along. And to argue that he had nothing to do with it, or that he was very remote from the process, is just craziness.”

Shuji's friend and colleague Steve DenBaars remembered that, when Nichia researchers other than Nakamura were making presentations at conferences, they would always defer to their leader. “You'd ask them questions, and even though their English was good enough, they typically wouldn't be able to answer basic science questions; they would say, Nakamura will know. I mean, I went to all his early conference talks and it was clear that he was the only one who understood the technology. I've known Shuji a long time, we've had detailed technical discussions, and he knew gallium nitride inside out. And he still knows it much better than these guys.”

Ultimately, at the news conferences that followed the various judgments in the compensation case, Nichia representatives were repeatedly asked by both Japanese and non-Japanese journalists the following, telling question: If Shuji Nakamura was indeed so unimportant in the development of bright blue, green, and white LEDs and the blue-violet semiconductor laser, then why was this point not made until after he had left Nichia? While Nakamura was still an employee, the company was perfectly happy to let him be seen by the world as the main mover behind its R&D. Even as late as 2001, in its trade secrets suit against Cree, Nichia acknowledged that Nakamura's work had made the company a world leader in gallium nitride-based devices. The fact that they knew that his knowledge was so important was precisely why Nichia was so keen to stop him from, as they saw it, consorting with the enemy.

In December 2004 the Tokyo High Court recommended that Nakamura and Nichia get together and work out an amicable settlement. Nakamura's lawyer urged him to accept the advice, on the grounds that the original decision might be reversed if he refused. On January 11, 2005, a settlement was announced. Nichia would pay their former employee 843 million yen (about $8 million).

Both sides declared victory. Since this was the largest amount ever awarded as compensation to a Japanese corporate researcher, Shuji's lawyer claimed that Shuji had won. The rights of an individual versus a company had been established. A precedent had been set. Though unhappy with the terms of the settlement, Nichia decided to accept it and get on with business. Thereafter, Eiji would tell customers visiting Anan that the problem with Shuji was simply that he had wanted too much money for himself, and that was not in the best interests of the market.

For his part, Nakamura's initial reaction to the judgment was that he was not at all satisfied at the outcome. In fact, he was furious at what he saw as a biased judicial system that had sided with corporate Japan against him as an individual. In seeking to cap his settlement at a much lower amount, the Tokyo High Court had, he felt, acted in Nichia's interest to avoid damaging the company's future growth by requiring it to make a large payout. As for the amount he had been awarded, most of it would go to pay taxes and legal fees. He would be lucky if he had enough left to pay off his mortgage.

Later, however, when he had cooled down, Shuji would come to see the settlement as a win, albeit not on the scale that he had hoped for. The issue of whether the individual or the organization was primarily responsible for inventions was still unresolved. But at least he had struck a blow on behalf of the individual inventor. And he was very happy about that.2

Despite the fact that the legal battle was now over, Nichia would continue to do everything in its power to denigrate Nakamura. For example, when he spoke publicly, Nichia people would be there at the venue, distributing copies of their anti-Shuji tract. And they would badger the organizers of his lectures, insisting on their right of reply.

Nonetheless, in Japan, Nakamura has become something of a folk hero. He is recognized there wherever he goes. DenBaars recalled a recent visit to Japan with Shuji and their colleague Jim Speck. “Just walking through Tokyo Station, we got stopped by three different groups of people that wanted to have their picture taken with him. The first was a group of mature women; the second, some older salarymen, who wished him good luck. We were teasing him about how famous he was, and he was saying, No, it's only the older people that recognize me. And maybe one minute after he said that, two young girls stopped him and asked for his picture.”

It occurred to DenBaars that “a lot of people see his fight against Nichia for reasonable compensation as a kind of movement for change, for cultural reform on how people are rewarded. Shuji always feels that Japan has to change, that the best Japanese baseball players are leaving to play in the US—like Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners—and now the best Japanese scientists are starting to leave, too.”

The lawsuits had eaten up enormous amounts of his precious time. At their most taxing, Shuji was having to go back to Japan almost every month. Now, with the legal distractions out of the way, as we shall see in the next chapter, he was finally able to focus on his research—and a new element in his life, his students.

1. For an example of how Nakamura directed laser development at Nichia remotely, see chapter 5, p. 126.

2. In March 2006 Nichia announced that it was abandoning its rights to the “404” patent. In a statement, the company claimed that it had ceased using the technology covered by the patent in 1997.