October 16, 2026
Elation Seeks $671,897 After ETC Abandons Patent Case
A dispute over LED color technologies ends with a new financial fight
Electronic Theatre Controls and Elation Lighting are two of the best-known names in entertainment lighting. ETC, based in Middleton, Wisconsin, makes the Source Four and the Eos family of lighting consoles, which are standard equipment in theaters across North America. Elation, based in Los Angeles, supplies LED fixtures and moving heads to stages, studios and touring productions.
In November 2024, ETC sent Elation a letter saying its testing showed that Elation’s Fuze Teatro fixture and its ColourTune feature infringed three ETC patents. ETC demanded that Elation stop selling the fixture, recall it within ten business days, and discuss a license. Twenty-two months later, ETC asked a judge to end its own lawsuit permanently, and Elation is now asking ETC to pay $671,897 in legal fees. We had not covered the case before, so this is a recap.
Two Technologies on Trial
ETC filed suit in Los Angeles federal court in January 2025. The first patent covers dim-to-warm, a method for making a multi-color LED fixture shift warmer as it dims, the way an incandescent lamp does. ETC’s Mike Wood is one of its inventors. ETC said the Fuze Teatro’s Dim to Warm mode used the patented method.
The other two patents cover a newer technique called metameric control. It changes the spectrum a fixture produces, which changes how skin, costumes and scenery look under the light, while the color of the light itself stays the same. ETC accused ColourTune’s three settings: Highest Output, Highest Fidelity, and a balanced blend of the two. ETC asked the court for damages and an order stopping Elation’s sales.
Looking for Proof Inside the Fixture
ETC’s dim-to-warm claim had a practical difficulty. The patent describes a sequence of calculations performed inside the fixture’s controller, and those calculations are not visible from outside the fixture. ETC acknowledged early in the case that it needed Elation’s source code to confirm how the fixture worked. Elation objected that ETC was asking for the evidence after it had already filed the lawsuit.
In February 2026, Elation said it did not have the source code. The filings indicate that the code most likely belongs to CKC, the Chinese company that manufactures the fixtures. ETC waited until spring to try to bring CKC into the case. The judge called that delay unexplained and refused the request.
A Ruling on a Few Words
On August 17, Judge Anne Hwang ruled on what key phrases in the patents mean, and the ruling decided the case. The dim-to-warm patent refers to “the color temperature” without ever establishing which color temperature it means. The judge found the phrase too unclear to enforce, which made the dim-to-warm claims unusable. ETC later told the court that the patent covered technology important to the company.
The metameric control patents require the light’s color to stay the same when the spectrum changes. ETC’s own measurements put ColourTune’s three modes at three slightly different color points. ETC argued they still counted as the same because the differences fell within a one-step MacAdam ellipse, the range within which most people cannot see a color shift. The judge disagreed and ruled that the claims require the same color, not a color that merely looks the same.
A Quick Exit
Elation told ETC that its own measurements could not meet the judge’s reading of the patents and offered to settle the case on those terms. The two companies tell different stories about what happened next. ETC says it offered to drop the case and Elation refused. Elation says ETC’s offer would have required Elation to give up any claim to its legal fees.
ETC then promised in writing not to sue Elation over these patents again and asked the court to close the case. On August 28, the judge dismissed it permanently. She also required ETC to extend that promise to ADJ Products, Elation’s affiliated importer, and kept the case open so the court could decide the question of fees.
The $671,897 Question
Elation’s lawyers report more than 1,100 hours of work on the case, and Elation wants ETC to pay for all of it. ETC accepts that Elation won the case. It argues, however, that dropping a lawsuit promptly after a bad ruling is ordinary and should not be penalized. Fees are shifted in patent cases only when a judge finds that a case stood out as unusually weak or was handled unreasonably. The hearing is November 18.
Elation’s strongest argument involves ETC’s own console. Elation attached a 2018 Eos operations manual describing color-matching modes called Brightest, Spectral and Hybrid. That manual predates ETC’s metameric control patents. Elation says those modes match the ColourTune settings ETC accused. Its point is that if ColourTune infringed, ETC’s own earlier consoles would show the idea was not new, and the patents would fail.
Elation also says sealed evidence shows Wood acknowledged before the lawsuit that most competitors do not use the dim-to-warm method in his patent. ETC’s response to the fee request was not among the filings we reviewed. Elation’s separate allegation that ETC withheld a 2016 workshop video from the Patent Office was never decided.
What Lighting People Can Take From It
The two control patents were not invalidated, and no court has ruled on Elation’s argument about the Eos manual. For lighting people, the more lasting lessons are practical ones. Wording that seems obvious in an engineering meeting can fail in court. An undefined reference to “the color temperature” and a color requirement with no stated tolerance decided this case before anyone argued about how the fixtures actually worked.
The case also shows the difficulty of proving infringement in products whose behavior is set by firmware written overseas. A spectrometer can show what a fixture outputs, but not how its controller produced that output. And a company’s own manuals and spec sheets can be used against its patents. Before accusing a competitor’s feature, a patent owner should check whether its own product literature described the same feature first.
