this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Shuji Nakamura was a researcher at Nichia who was determined to create the first blue LED, which had eluded scientists for decades. Through innovative crystal growth techniques and materials discoveries, he succeeded in developing bright blue and white LEDs in the early 1990s. This breakthrough enabled LEDs to be used for full-spectrum lighting. Nichia's fortunes grew enormously as a result, though Nakamura was not properly compensated for his invention. Today, LEDs powered by Nakamura's blue LED technology are ubiquitous and have brought enormous energy savings worldwide.
Something interesting I found was that Nakamura persisted in his research for blue LEDs against the wishes of his company management, who saw it as a waste of resources. His stubbornness and belief in his work paid off by solving a problem that had stumped the electronics industry for 30 years.
He really got screwed. They didn't want him even working on blue LEDs and then when he was right and actually made one they gave him nothing and made hundreds of millions of dollars. Then sued him when he left to work for another company for "leaking company secrets" which was really all his work. He counter sued and the courts awarded him like 189 million, then the company counter sued back and he got 8 million which just covered his legal fees.
Wow... for brief, fleeting moment i thought justice prevailed in the end. Silly me.
Um... if someone pays you to do a thing, then they own it. Imagine if you paid me a hundred thousand dollars to build a house and then it's my house to live in. Doesn't make any sense at all.
I'm not defending the company, but the law is pretty clear on this. If you want to own your own work, then start your own company.
I think their comment is more a critique of wage labour than a misunderstanding of it.
The world is full of tech companies that pay stock options/etc, if that's how you want to be paid then you can do that.
Personally I have no interest in that at all and have always turned it down. If I'm going to own shares in a company, then I want voting rights. Nothing worse than watching investment be run by someone you disagree with... actually there is something worse. A company where every single employee has control/voting rights. That would be a complete disaster.
Isn't that called a co-op? I hear those tend to do well.
Yeah they go really well. Like you probably use some and don’t realize it. One of my local gas station chains is one
It sucks that they're down voting you for being correct in your top comment, though I think I agree with the down votes for your characterisation of worker controlled enterprises as "a complete disaster". They actually work well
I would say that the thing that makes me want to downvote that comment the most is the part where you get stocks/options "if that's what you want".
It's not like every company would offer you that and even if they do promise they might not do that
Our team has joined a big company and we were promised stocks but sure enough they said "we usually don't do that so we don't have a contract for such a case". Our manager almost made them hold their word a year after we joined, then he got fired and sure enough we got nothing. Well, at least the other conditions were not too bad and then the team split and everyone went their own way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh no, not co-ops! They give the people, who actually create the products and know how they work, voting rights on the companies direction? So dumb. Everyone knows its best to have a business person, whose sole focus is the stock market and shareholders, controlling the direction of every company.
/s in case it wasn't glaringly obvious.
That's fine, but if one of your employees comes up with a revolutionary product that makes billions and you choose not to compensate him in any meaningful way, don't then get surprised when they leave to join another company and definitely don't sue them for doing so
You legally own what they produced, but you don't own the individual.
Funnily enough, the labor to create something is a large basis of Proudhon's critique in "What is Property?" You sure as hell didn't spend labor to create the land that house was built on. No one did. Who gave you control over it, and how was it their right?
If that house somehow generated more money than you knew what to do with, I'd be happy as hell to share with the person who made it.
Except companies have shareholders that spent their retirement money to purchase shares. You can't just hand it out, since it's not your money
That's like say giving good employees a bonus is stealing some stockholder's hard-earned retirement. Employee compensation is just a standard expense. Similarly, potential shares of licensing revenue are a common incentive companies dangle to get more employees working on patentable ideas. Maybe only a couple percent, but for significant stuff like this it works out well for everyone involved.
You should give good employees a bonus. But you can't give away hundreds of millions just to be good to your employees because it's not your money
Nobody is talking about giving him all proceeds. Maybe 1%, and not trying to sue the shit out of him, would've left everyone happy. In the end they undoubtedly wasted more money on lawyers acting like pricks. That's investor money too. And they almost lost hundreds of millions in a countersuit due to their egregious behavior. Poorly handled, even from an investor perspective.
In another reply I said they should have given him like 8 million to start and avoided the whole issue.
Agreed
don't invest (or gamble) what you can't afford to lose.
using some people's poor money management skills as an excuse to justify exploitation of the source of your windfall is exceptionally stupid.
a receding tide beaches all boats. every time something like this happens, another genius with another big idea sees it and decides it's not worth it if they're just going to get the result stripped away from them by parasitic suits.
His entire argument is literally debunked by Veritaseum's other video about game theory and cooperation. Nobody will be nice to a corporation where everybody knows the board members always will defect against you.
True, and I think he wasn't compensated enough. But giving him hundreds of millions is a bit much as well. If they gave him 8 million at the very start without going to court that would have been a good bonus
It's not one person's retirement. Retirement funds have millions of people's retirement. You can't just give away a company's money because it's not the CEO's money. It's the shareholders' money
He should have been fairly compensated, but again, only up to the point where it encourages workers to work hard
and they exist within a continuum of risk profiles. there are safer (and less potentially profitable) options, and there are riskier (and more potentially profitable) options. they have made this decision.
you cannot pick the riskiest options for your retirement fund and then get mad there was more risk than the safest options and that you lost some of it. you cannot pick the safest options and then get mad it's not performing as well as the riskiest. if you cannot afford to lose your retirement money, do not put it into any fund or mechanism that will gamble with it beyond what you are comfortable with. it is YOUR responsibility. alone.
as a result of your mentality, we will see less and less innovation. people who can improve the world see you and your opinions and decide, well, it's not worth it. what intelligent person would ever work with organizations that you claim are justifiably ethically bound to stab them in the back and reward them the bare minimum possible?
and why, because grandpa ticked the "minimum risk" button in his sofi 401k and is mad he's not getting explosive vc-tech-company-tier returns? or because your uncle ticked the "maximum risk" button and is mad he lost some money? you're catering to the lowest common denominator of uninformed, entitled gamblers and are poisoning the well and breaking the whole system down as a result.
let me guess, you have an MBA?
I don't have an MBA, I'm saying that the CEO can only reward enough bonuses to people so they don't feel like they get stabbed in the back.
This amount might be single digit million USD, like the 8 million awarded in the end. The original bonus was quite insulting. The first amount the court ordered was actually not bad from the court's point of view since the case went to court and there are legal fees, the amount should be higher to discourage companies from screwing their employees
But awarding 200 million to begin with would be overkill. It doesn't accomplish anything other than being a "lottery" payout. Other workers can't expect this much money because it's literally one of those discoveries of a century