Boston University has filed a patent infringement suit against Apple in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts Tuesday claiming that a thin film semiconductor device found in the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air was invented by electrical and computer engineering professor Dr. Theodore D. Moustakas in 1997.
According to the Trustees of Boston, Moustakas is the named inventor of patent 5,686,738 titled 'Highly Insulating Monocrystalline Gallium Nitride Thin Films.'
"Defendant's acts of infringement have caused and will continue to cause substantial and irreparable damage to the University," BU said.
Speaking about the university's chances in this suit, analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates said, '"Courts can be irrational in these cases. You get these ridiculous judgments sometimes and they may think of Apple as a big, rich company that doesn't deserve all that money."
Kay said that if Boston University ends up on the winning side, they could win as much as $75 million.
This isn't the first time; the university has fought a patent infringement. It has previously filed seven identical lawsuits against other companies, including Samsung and Amazon.
"We've definitely seen a step up in university patent lawsuits," said Mark Lemley, a patent expert at Stanford University Law School. "Universities have been cash-strapped in the last several years with the economic downturn, and this looks like a good source of revenue. They're also looking around and everyone else is doing it."
The colleges and universities across the country started considering patent lawsuits as additional financial resources when a jury announced a verdict in favor of Carnegie Mellon University and awarded about $1.2 billion in a patent lawsuit December against Marvell Technology Group and Marvell Semiconductor Inc.
"You can imagine university administrators facing a budget crisis pointing to Carnegie Mellon and saying, 'If their patent is worth a billion, surely ours is worth something, " Lemley said.