Epistar/ITRI agreement over LED patents?

An article by Taipei Times on LEDs contained the text: Taiwanese LED companies, which entered the LED industry about two decades ago, are facing a growing IPR threat from bigger firms, which commonly use patent law suits as major tools to slow the development of rivals.

The Times article was not totally clear on the news it was reporting, but the issue sounded interesting:

Epistar Corp, Taiwan's biggest maker of chips for light-emitting diodes (LED), inked an agreement with a government-sponsored research institution [ITRI] yesterday to obtain eight patents with relatively lower royalties that boost luminous effect and will help them avoid disputes over intellectual property rights.

This would be an interesting twist on the Bayh-Dole Act in the U.S.