The Tokyo District Court awarded Shuji Nakamura, the Japanese electronics engineer who invented the 'Blu-ray' LED technology, the full amount he had been seeking from his former company, Nichia Corp., a court official said.

The payment is the largest ever in Japan for the transfer of patent rights.

"Engineers have long been ignored," Nakamura, now a 49-year-old professor of engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told reporters at the front gate of the court building following the landmark judgment.

"I'm pleased that the invention was assessed fairly," said Nakamura, who initially received only 20,000 yen from his company for his contributions to the LED technology.

Nichia immediately appealed to a higher court, saying the district court "over-estimated" the patent and unfairly assessed the contribution and role of the company and other engineers.

The case was widely watched as it was expected set a precedent for how Japanese companies treat inventors on their payroll who generally get a pittance in exchange for sometimes revolutionary and hugely profitable inventions.

"If we invent technology that creates a one trillion or two trillion yen market, and we are just awarded 100 million yen, all the engineers in Japan would decide to become baseball players or comedians," Nakamura joked.

"In Japan, talking about money bears a bad image but money is equal to a fair evaluation."

The LED technology has been widely applied as the basis for colour displays on cellphones, personal digital assistants and automobile instruments worldwide.

The breakthrough was also the basis for a blue laser needed in the 'Blu-ray Disc', a next-generation, high-capacity format for digital versatile discs (DVDs) currently in development by Sony Corp. and others.

Blue lasers enable far more data to be stored on a standard-size CD-ROM disc than can be done with a red laser -- 27 gigabytes.

By coincidence, in the latest example of the technology's impact on the industry, global computer giants Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Company of the United States on Friday announced their participation in the international high-tech group seeking to set a common standard for the Blu-ray Disc format.

Nakamura filed the lawsuit in 2001, demanding the company surrender the patent to him.

The Tokyo court ruled in September 2002 the patent should belong to Nichia, but suggested Nakamura deserved a major share of the profits earned by the company on the technology which would be decided in a separate case.

Nakamura invented the blue LED in 1993 while working at Nichia and registered the patent under the company name.

He has argued the blue LED is not a company invention because he secretly developed it alone against the orders of the company but Nichia has said all patent rights based on the work of employees pass to it based on an unwritten understanding.

In a similar case settled Thursday, the Tokyo High Court ordered electronics giant Hitachi Ltd. to pay 162 million yen to a former company engineer, Seiji Yonezawa, for the transfer of patent rights related to optical disc technologies.

That amount was itself the record for compensation for patent transfer until Friday's ruling.

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