September 9, 2026
GE Lighting & LEDVANCE Win White Filament Patent Fight
Feit loses every challenged claim in sweeping patent board decision
Feit Electric spent two years going after rivals over the color of a light bulb's filament when it's switched off. On August 28, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruled that every claim of U.S. Patent No. 8,604,678 asserted against LEDVANCE and GE Lighting is unpatentable, delivering the most significant setback yet to Feit Electric's campaign to police white LED filament technology.
According to a joint status report filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, the PTAB's Final Written Decision resolved consolidated inter partes review (IPR) proceedings that LEDVANCE and Savant Technologies (doing business as GE Lighting) brought against Feit's '678 patent, which covers a "wavelength conversion component with a diffusing layer." The board also denied Feit's contingent motion to amend, declining to enter 20 proposed substitute claims that Feit had offered as a fallback.
The consolidated case combined two petitions by the same set of challengers. David Radulescu, a name familiar to anyone who has tracked LED intellectual property litigation over the past decade, led the petitioners' counsel team. Radulescu's firm has built a practice, in part, around dismantling lighting patents at the PTAB, and this outcome fits a pattern his clients have chased before.
Building Toward This Point
Feit filed the underlying lawsuits in early 2024, first against LEDVANCE in February and then against Savant/GE Lighting in March, both centered on the same patent and the same technical claim: that the two rivals infringed Feit's approach to giving LED filaments a white, rather than yellow, appearance when the bulb is off. Feit had spent the prior year building out its intellectual property position around the aesthetic, following a 2023 press release that foreshadowed the litigation to come.
Above: Image of GE Lighting packaging submitted as part of Feit's legal complaint
The defendants counterpunched at the patent office rather than the courthouse, and the strategy paid off in stages. The PTAB instituted review in October 2025, finding a reasonable likelihood that at least one of 16 challenged claims could not survive scrutiny. Nearly a year later, the board went further than that initial signal suggested, invalidating the claims outright rather than issuing the mixed verdict that characterizes roughly half of PTAB decisions nationally.
What Comes Next
Feit is not conceding. The company intends to seek Director Review of the decision under the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Interim Process for Director Review, with a deadline of September 28 to file. If that request fails, Feit retains the option to appeal to the Federal Circuit under 35 U.S.C. § 319. The parties have agreed to keep the underlying district court litigation stayed and to file another status update within 90 days, or sooner if the Director Review request is resolved first.
That leaves the '678 patent in a strange limbo. The claims at issue in this litigation have been found unpatentable, but the ruling is not final while review options remain open, and any surviving portions of Feit's broader patent portfolio around white filament technology are untouched by this decision.
For lighting people watching the decorative LED lamp category, the case is a reminder that a patent's real test rarely comes in the courtroom where it was first asserted. It comes months later, in front of administrative judges evaluating prior art that the original examiner may never have seen.
