Agilent wins IP case against firm started by ex-employees in China

The instrument maker Agilent Technologies has won a $1.25 million patent infringement judgment against J&X Technologies, a gas chromatography firm started in China by former Agilent employees. J&X did not defend itself in court or respond in any way.

J&X was formed by four former Agilent gas chromatography (GC) researchers in Shanghai who worked for years to develop a better way to pass samples between two different separation columns in what’s known as 2-D GC, even securing a patent for Agilent on the technology in 2012. But Agilent didn’t bring the technique to market, going instead with a competing approach. In early 2015, the researchers left and formed J&X to commercialize their work.

Later that year, the researchers approached Agilent about licensing the patent, but the company declined. So J&X went ahead and commercialized a device anyway, Agilent claims in court documents, using information in the patent and copies of lab notebooks and technical drawings the researchers had copied or taken before quitting.

In 2017, J&X exhibited the device at a GC symposium in Fort Worth, Texas. It also applied for patents in China and the US on a complete 2-D GC system using the device. Agilent says the applications describe improvements the researchers developed at Agilent that were being held as trade secrets.

In an email to C&EN, Xiaosheng Guan, one of the founders of J&X, argues that the firm’s technology intentionally avoids anything covered by the patent. Regarding trade secrets, he says Agilent published the subsequent improvements in a 2016 Analytical Chemistry paper (DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.6b02525), making them fair game. “Since then, we have developed and iterated our . . . products based on the 2016 AC paper,” Guan says. Agilent disputes that characterization.

Despite what J&X considers a strong argument, “responding to an expensive lawsuit in US is nothing more than a financial suicide," Guan says, "as J&X is still small and running on no to very little profit.”

Because J&X “failed to appear, plead, or otherwise defend in this action,” the judge in the case wrote, the court considers J&X to have admitted to all of Agilent’s claims. The judgment orders J&X to stop making and selling anything based on the contested intellectual property (IP), destroy or return all related documents, and pay Agilent the $1.25 million in damages. It also transfers ownership of the patent applications to Agilent.

But because J&X is based in China and didn’t respond to the lawsuit, enforcement of all but the last of those provisions will prove difficult. “Agilent may face hurdles in securing payment by conventional means unless J&X has assets and accounts in the US,” says Kendrew Colton, a patent attorney at Fitch, Even, Tabin & Flannery who was not involved in the case. “Ultimately, the victory may be in the publicity that Agilent does enforce its US IP.”