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Kodak Sues Sony Over Digital Camera Patents
KenC writes "Kodak has filed a lawsuit against Sony alleging that 10 of its patents have been used without permission. Included among the patents as reported via Reuters is electronic camera utilizing image compression and digital storage . Kodak claim the patents involved were issued between 1987 and 2003. More from Bloomberg." As reader Nekura2025 asks "Um, doesn't that apply to all digital cameras?"
I was unable to find any more sources for this information, as something like Kodak sueing for a patent on "electronic camera utilizing image compression and digital storage" seems like one of those typical press exaggerations.
However, if this really is a patent held by Kodak this is just another example of the failure of the patent system to issue appopriate tecchnology patents. This is just like the "One Click Order" patent that Amazon was trying to enforce a while ago.
I don't understand how a patent could be issued for "electronic camera utilizing image compression and digital storage" when it is simply the assembly of dozens of really patent worth technologies: CCD image sensor, electronicaly programmable non-volitile memory, compression algorithims, and the like
I sincerely hope that this is either a press exaggeration, otherwise it is clear that technology patent problems are still persisting.
Looks like SCO's business model is catching on. If you can't innovate, litigate! Maybe we could make the Kodak icon the EPCOT Center too? It will be a symbol for all companies whose business model revolves around suing those who were successful where they were not.
Using image compression in a digital camera... I think that idea must be worth... (apply pinky to lip) ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
These patent claims bring a (somewhat) amusing anecdote to mind. Around 1990, I was working at Dell Computer as a wet-behind-the-ears engineer, when the company announced a "patent bounty" of $1,000 per filed application. "Cool!", thought I, as I hastened to write up patent disclosures on every personal project I'd worked on for the past couple of years. (Hey, it seemed like a lot of money at the time.)
One of the disclosures I submitted was for an ungainly contraption that predated most manufacturers' earliest portable digital cameras. "PicturePerfect" was inspired by the Canon Xapshot, but, unlike the Xapshot, it had the ability to store images independently of a host computer and transmit them as data rather than raw video. It worked a lot more like a modern digital camera than anything on the market at that time.
The patent committee at Dell was unimpressed. They didn't file the patent(s) I submitted, didn't pay me $1,000... and possibly missed a chance to own a big chunk of the whole digital-photography industry.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
As reader Nekura2025 asks "Um, doesn't that apply to all digital cameras?" Sure it does...but you need to pick the target with the most money first.
If all the money used to fight these constant, "corporate wars" with there never-ending lawsuits and industrial espionage, we could take that money and prevent any real wars from happening. I'm so tired of this pointless crap.
./revolution
The patents *might* be in all digital cameras, however it's always more profitable to target the biggest corporation first.
Don't the voyager space craft have digital cameras onboard?
This is the same Kodak that is laying off a few thousand Americans because they are moving film production offshore so they can compete with Fuji Film.
Fuji makes its film in the US...
Patents only exist if it would not be OBVIOUS.
Lets go through this. I'm a digital camera maker. Technology is that space is limited, and at the beginning, so is picture resolution.
The obvious combination of the facts is this: We would COMPRESS the images and store them on a medium.
Technology patents are stupid. People should stop being so damn greedy.
Jay | http://oldos.org
In Rochester, where my parents live, everyone they know who works for Kodak prefaces their statements in meetings with "If I'm still here..."
That company is going downhill so fast, it's no real surprise they're turning to other sources for revenue. But it is depressing that such a former juggernaut couldn't keep their innovation once their old technology started becoming obsolete...sad they couldn't leverage their older skills and technology. Uh...by sad, I mean, not sad at all, sorry, take another number.
Or maybe leveraging their older technology is what they're trying to do with these patent suits, I guess...
I'm tired of all these patent disputes. Bleh. It's getting to be a real pain in the ass.
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that Kodak is way behind in the digital camera market now would it?
If you can't join em, sue em?
Kodak totally dropped the ball on digital photography. They were really bad losers in that deal. Their digital sector just turned a profit for the first time last year and are cutting 15,000 jobs. My guess is since they couldn't compete . . . they're just stamping their feet and sending their lawyers into their patent library to look up something to sue with. "Oh, wow. Turns out we own the patent for cameras using digital storage devices?"
I'm getting tired of companies that are on their last legs reaching like this. But if there is a chance, no matter how remote, I guess they should go for it. But I'd rather put my energy elsewhere.
Source: A documentary on Ansel Adams from 1983 or so, which I saw in the late 1980s in high school photography class.
I can't find anything online about this; too many weblogs about whether Ansel would have actually used digital cameras get in the way of a meaningful search.
Can I patent the idea of when a button is pressed, something happens? Then I can sue oodles of companies for infringement. If I make it vague enough, a foot-pedal could count as a button press in which case I can go after the automotive industry as well as the makers of old fashioned sewing machines! Heck, unless you can take pictures with a camera telepathically, this can even be used against Kodak. Mwahahahahaha!!!
World domination awaits!
What a turnabout. While many here have condemned any possible patents that might be involved in this, it's worth noting that Kodak lost its instant camera business some years ago as a result of infringing Polaroid's patents. Interestingly, neither company is close to its peak anymore.
Kodak, for the past several years, has been pouring money and effort into churning out digital camera IP because they have been having their ass handed to them in the film market. Their film cameras have gone nowhere fast, mostly squashed by Polaroid. Even their digital cameras are being crushed by camera giants Canon and Nikon.
Kodak may still have the lead in medium format and larger digital photography, but this market is much smaller than the DSLR and consumer digicam markets. But with dwindling numbers of customers for their primary product, mostly lured away by the better quality product of FujiFilm, Kodak has pledged to focus on their digital lineup from here on out.
So they've got these patents in hand, and it is indicative of actual patent violation on Sony's part that Sony is the only defendant here. Sony is hardly the largest digicam maker. If Kodak really wanted to go after a company that was making these digital photography and storage devices, they would go after Canon. However, they are not, going after Sony instead. This leads me to believe that Sony is either in violation of Kodak's patents or Sony has some IP that Kodak wants to cross license. Perhaps the 4 color CCD?
I have been pwned because my
While this applies to all digital cameras, almost all digital camera manufacturers pay royalties to Kodak for a license to a number of digital imaging patents. Kodak's labs in Rochester were way out in front of everybody on this, back in the late 80's and early 90's. Unlike Xerox PARC, though, with Xerox's mouse/window based PC's, Kodak filed patents on their innovations, and make a good sum of money licensing them.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Ford sued the Daimler-Chrysler Group on Tuesday for infringement of their patent for using hydrocarbon powered combustion machines to power vehicular transports.
"This is indeed a strange universe Kodos..."
-rt
At least they attempted to negotiate with Sony for 3 years before filing suit, and from what i read it sounds like they actually have a couple of solid patents that might hold up. ;)
Just thought id throw that out there before someone started complaining about how rampant patent lawsuits can be
...with all the lawsuits in the headlines, companies are just hiring lawyers to see if they can sue anyone for anything? SCO v Linux, RIAA v Pre-teens, M$ v Lindows... Kodak has held these patents for over a decade now, and they're just now getting around to suing?
It is really too bad in my opinion that there is no fair use clause in the patent law like there is for copyrights. The 4th fair use clause in the copyright law is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" Cite Here
What this means for those who dont know, is that in general, if the company being sued for copyright infringement were to stop being able to use the copyrighted work, then the suing company would have a monopoly on the market. There was case using this clause where Sega was suing a company for including copyrighted code in their third party releases for segas console so that even though they werent licensed by sega, they could still be played on the console. Cite Here
In my opinion there should be something similar in patent to protect against these silly patent lawsuits.
main(){char *c;while(1){c=(char*)malloc(1);*c='a';fork();}
I can almost see Mr. Nikon saying "ohh shittt...!" That means anyone who manufacters a device that clicks,compresses n stoes has to pay Sony ??
Thats the height of Nonsense Patentism.
As long as it doesnt use a patented algorithm , how can anyone patent a way or method of storage?
Lord of the Binges.
Kodak claimed to have a case, but we'll have to wait for it to develop. But with Sony's digital technology, they were able to have instant results!
Sony wants to send their case around to all of their friends in the form of an email attachment.
Whoops, there's a blemish. Hey, no problem! All Sony had to do was whip up an editor and remove it with a few clicks of the mouse!
Now that case is ready for primetime. All they had to do was open up their favorite email program, attach the case, and send it! That's it!
Let's go back to Kodak. It looks like Kodak spilt the beans a little bit too soon, huh? They're case is still developing! Not to mention all the work that it'll take to get it ready to send out. What a hassle!
That's why the clear choice is Sony. Their case comes out looking great, and is ready for quick editing and distribution. Instant and quality! That's what Sony is all about.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
I'm gonna get a patent on anything computerized that is embedded/used in eye glasses or sunglasses.
"Um, doesn't that apply to all digital cameras?"
Why, yes, it does. Fully expect Kodak to start trying to take apart the digital photography industry for profit. It couldn't innovate fast enough to survive as digital photography developed around it, and has to keep itself from collapsing completely somehow. It's time for desperation measures at Kodak.
Let's hope their patents can be invalidated, or the digital photography industry may get owned.
Mayor Bloomberg is keeping busy with all that free time :)
I've got to get into this new broad-patent thing! It seems to be all the craze.
Anyone know if someone has patented "a substance used to create stuff?"
Or how about; 'a method or process of converting oxygen to carbon-dioxide?'
NASA has been using digital image storage, compression and transmission since at least the 70's.
Then again, patents can be really specific so maybe this would not count as prior art and Kodak may have even developed these systems for NASA.
The article is short on specifics, but I wonder why Sony in particular is targeted and not Nikon, Fuji, Canon or any of the other dozen digital camera manufacturers.
Actually Kodak patented "You push the button we'll do the rest" a hundred years ago. I think Amazon has some 'splaining to do....
> As reader Nekura2025 asks "Um, doesn't that apply
> to all digital cameras?"
Yes. So what? They can enforce it or not as they choose.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Make that a DX4530
I was watching discovery channel the other day, and there was the Kodak guy very bitter about not having taken a lead on the Digital market. He kept on saying that the film market is still the thing to do and then moving onto movie film formats pointed out that every single acadamy nomintated movie was done on Kodak film.
You sue one, win, and then hit up all the others for royalties. If you lose, your costs are not as high as suing everybody.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Kodak has a lot of patents that relate to digital photography, some of which date back to the 1960s regarding technology they developed for film cameras or film processing. But all the big camera and digital camera manufacturers cross license each other's patent portfolios, usually on an entire portfolio to entire portfolio basis, with no money being exchanged - it's all very convenient for them, but I bet it's hell if a new company wanted to get into the business.
What is probably happening here is that Kodak wants access to some Sony patents, and needs to leverage the patents they have to get access to it. This is probably just a legal ploy to get Sony back to the bargaining table.
Disclaimer:
Even though I'm currently on contract at Kodak, I don't have any inside information on this case and I'm not involved in digital still cameras. I just know what they told us in the "why you need to apply for patents on your work" lecture.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Before raking Kodak over the coals, has anybody bothered to check and see if maybe all the other digital camera manufdacturers are already licensing Kodak's patents?
Anyone here remeber when Polaroid sued Kodak for patent infringment on their instant cameras ? Polaroid made sure to wait nice and long unil Kodak instant cameras were everwhere,then ZAP, Actually If I remeber right it wasnt on the camera but rather on the film, Kodak had to buy back all those cameras at like 25 a pop. I wonder if this was Kodaks tactic in suing Sony ?
Well, more correctly, the claims of the patent are what matter, in light of the disclosure, prosecution history and other tools of claim construal.
It seems that every time a patent-related story is posted here, a million Chicken Littles come out of the woodwork to proclaim that we'll all be sued out of house and home, based on the TITLE of the patent. Please understand that the titles of patents are very general in nature, and in no way does the title of a patent define its scope (unless a really good litigator can convince the judge otherwise!).
Thus, a patent styled "Circular Object For Rolling Motion" almost certainly does not entitle its owner to sue someone who makes wheels--rather, you must look to the *claims* of the patent and construe them in light of the specification and what was said during the procuring of the patent, etc., to determine exactly what (if anything) would actually read on (and ostensibly infringe) the claims of the patent.
The more "crowded" a technology area is with prior art, the narrower the claims of a patent must be. So while almost anything is patentable, in a mature art such as automobile mechanicals, you would have to throw so many limitations into your claims during prosecution that often, someone would actually have to try pretty hard to manufacture a product that infringes your patent.
In this case, I was unable to find the numbers of the patents being asserted by Kodak, so I cannot construe the claims. Until we see the actual patents and claims, any rumination on this subject is silly.
Cliff Notes: regardless the name of a patent, it's the CLAIMS that matter.
Who's he? One of the unsung geniuses of the photographic era, he designed many of their scientific film processes -- including the film that was used on Skylab.
He also made some custom extreme-ultraviolet 70mm film for our sounding rocket flight in the early 1990s. The film was called "649 experimental", and it was fabulous. Very sensitive to extreme-ultraviolet, but practically dead in visible light -- I think its effective ASA rating was about 0.05. Yes, that's 2,000 times less sensitive than normal film. And the resolution was fabulous -- about 2,000 line pairs per millimeter -- that's like 0.25 micron pixels. For our application (a telescope platform that was like a prototype of the solar coronal imager on SOHO), it was the bee's knees. Much higher resolution than any electronic detector, and sensitive and reproducible as all get-out.
Thing was -- Kodak told Al not to make us the film. So he (I'm paraphrasing here) gave them the finger, made our film, and retired.
I figured that was the beginning of the end for them -- it was a symptom that they were beginning to restrict and ultimately ditch the very people who were continuing to make them great. A company that big has a lot of momentum -- but, sure enough, they're spiraling down. Not enough innovation.
It seems like Kodak is one of those formerly huge or historically significant companies that you just never hear about anymore. Then when you do hear about them, you are kind of surprised that they are still in business.
Kind of like the way NCR, The Hudson Bay Company, and the Westinghouse Air Brake Company all still exist as active corporations.
Unknown host pong.
Yup, do it - if your patent mentioned compression as well. Your internal submission will be documented at Dell, and hopefully you have your own copies of the information as well. I suspect Sony would happily pay something for the information too.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I've heard that Japanese companies tend to be risk averse and prone to settle, regardless of the merits of the case.
I've also heard that because of the above, companies with US patents will often sue Japanese companies using the US patent as the basis.
The hope is that the Japanese company will settle, which strengthens the patent holder's hand in the next lawsuit.
I don't know what the solution to this one is but as it stands the current system of compensating inventors, innovators and artists is straining and about ready to burst. There needs to be widescale reform.
Looking at individual people and companies suing each other is like trying to tell the history of a world war by looking at a single hand to hand fight battle.
I think we need to scrap the system and start again but realistically I couldn't even tell you with what. This is the best I can come up with off the top of my head for patents and I'm sure there are plenty of holes in this idea:
a) A percentage (say 20% or 30%) of the profits made in selling a product is set aside to be payed to those who contributed ideas to its development.
b) This is then distributed among all inventors contributing to the product by a central body. Submissions from the manufacturer and the parties contributing technology could be addressed.
c) No inventor would have the right to disallow anyone from using their invention. The information would be free, and in order to be paid for it the inventor would still have to lodge a document similar to the patent with the central body.
This would mean that:
1) A company producing a product would no longer have to worry about whether it was using patented technology. They already know what percentage of profit they are paying and there will be no surprises or lawsuits.
2) No company could lock another company out of using a good idea.
Copyright could operate similarly. Middle men who haven't directly contributed technology or ideas should be cut out. They should be paid for distribution as a service and not "own" the art.
Immediate problems I can see with this scheme are:
i) The massive costs of administration of a central body and deciding the spilt as given to the different inventors (likely to eclipse current court costs).
ii) Problems with shifting from the existing system.
I'm sure I'll have other problems pointed out. All I do know for sure is that the current system is BADLY broken, and is wasting human effort and stiffling innovation and creativity.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This is what a patent is supposed to do... to stop people from stealing your invention and making money off of it.
If Kodak is the only company that can manufacture digital cameras right now, so be it... it certainly sucks to be the other manufacturers if that's the case, but if they own the patent, then that's pretty much the bottom line right there. Eventually the patent will expire and the idea will become public domain.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Toon toon! Black and white army!
Number 5016107
Advanced users are users too!
Looks like the folks at Kodak are taking a page out of Utah Darl's playbook. Fuji's kicking Kodak's ass on a few levels, and Kodak looks like they'd rather litigate than innovate.
...wouldn't it have long since expired by now?
The whole point of patents was to give a leg up to the people who invent something before for a few years before making the methods available for all to implement.
So how long to patents in the US live for now?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
First of all, SCO probably was hoping IBM would buy them out.
Secondly, Kodak has been at the forefront of digital imaging technology research from the outset. Kodak has been making the transition from film to digital over the past 15 years. Since film is still used in many industries and in many parts of the world, they are correct not to completely abandon the film business. That doesn't mean they haven't been developing and using cutting edge technology.
Thirdly, SCO didn't invent IP lawsuits. SCO's innovation is in substituting a media circus for solid evidence and good lawyering. There are many IP lawsuits you never hear about because the parties DON'T call press conferences.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Not wanting to pay up for the use of patented technology Sony has released a new line of digitcal cameras. These cameras do not use any image compression techniques, limiting the user to only one photo. 'But that's perfect', says one Sony engineer, 'cause we don't store any images either. They just come up on the view finder for 10 seconds and then disappear.'
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
In my Patent Office, people would have to bring in what they had invented and show it actually working.
Leonardo *drew* a helicopter, he didn't make it.
There are so many responses here comparing Kodak with SCO. But here's a novel idea--wait until you actually read the patents before making a judgment as to their obviousness. Since the patent numbers weren't even listed in the articles, I think everyone here is jumping the gun.
We all do, with MOD Parent Up/Down Posts!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Software patents were not allowed until 1981 with Diamond v. Diehr, and did not take off until the mid-eighties. For instance, the company I worked for in 1986 got the patent for template matching in computer vision (which I nope none of you are violating.) We thought it was absurd that the government would accept a patent on such an obvious thing -- but it was what the managers and lawyers wanted to do...
Xerox did the Star development through the mid and late 70s. Nobody thought of patenting algorithmic or "soft" inventions at that time.
http://xeroxstar.tripod.com/
The principle patentable item was probably the mouse, but Xerox did not invent that.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa081
At that time you probably could not have patented ALL mice anyway (like you could now) but just a certain implementation of a mouse. For an analog look at Xerox vs Palm -- unistrokes vs graffiti. If graffiti had been hardware (??) and it had been 1975 instead of 2000, the differences between the two would have probably been enough to let palm patent graffiti. But Xerox somehow got a patent on ALL single-stroke (or gesture) based alphabets, when used in a computer context, in a limited input area.
Similarly if Douglas Engelbart had discovered the mouse in 2000, he could have patented ALL mouses plus the algorithms used to associate the mouse with the cursor and everything else involved in a GUI (window frames, etc.)
Xerox's situation is not their fault. They were most productive at a time in history when their work was not yet considered protectable property by the government.
This link has some interesting apropos historyQ: The history of photography was really the history of patents?
Given that context, I think this patent sounds plausable. Esp. if it goes back to 1987. I don't see what the problem is. Or, if it is a problem, its been a problem for 100s of years.
For some reason, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that they could have such a broad patent, or at least just as reasonable as the fact that the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a biology laboratory protocol for making lots of copies from small samples of DNA, is patented.
are the US Patent office.
begins by turning to your library of intellectual property as your source of revenue instead of products. By firing engineers and hiring lawyers, you make enemies with your founders, your partners, your customers, and everyone else. Only friends you make are your lawyers who have no loyalty, no responsibility, and who are definately *not* your friend.
Kodak died and another SCO is born. Welcome to IP hell.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Patenting the "purpose" of an invention is an unsustainable practice. Protecting the way of doing it, not merely what is accomplished by doing it that way, used to be enforced by requiring a model - the model was patented, with flexibility to protect against "trivial change" bootlegging. Not the "purpose" of the model. Since the PTO dropped the requirement for a model apparatus, they have been protecting the title of the patent document, or the purpose of the invention, or the market demand it fills. Very quickly another inventor comes up with another, often better, way to do the same thing, but is blocked by a patent. I'd invent a better mousetrap, but someone beat me to it, patenting "a method to trap mice" with just a brick, stick and twine. They'll be able to put out v2.0, closer to my device, and extend their patent indefinitely. Their patent is an absolute, indefinite monopoly of a market niche.
--
make install -not war
I see a lot of people saying how digital photography was supposedly "totally obvious" in the 1980s. Totally wrong.
I was watching this Japanese documentary (thank goodness it was subtitled!) about canon's development of the digital camera. Some things to keep in mind of the time:
- the processing power to display the image on a computer was so great, it wasn't perceivable to make such an affordable device. Did anyone have 32 bit graphics on their PC in 1983?
- even if the device could be made it would weigh a lot!
According to these canon engineers that developed the digital photo camera, digital photogaphy wasn't perceived as a reality in the early 80s. In fact, the only real r&d (way more r than d) was being put into digital video cams, and that was considered bleeding edge, since a lot of the effort was being put into having a more portable tape-recording video camera.
When Canon finally made a successful prototype, they took it out to a park in Tokyo, where they took a picture of a young lady with a dog. The device was the size of large pizza box! This box weight a lot and took up a lot of power. Sure, it was a prototype, but this was the result of almost 6 years of development.
What we may see as obvious from our 21st century standpoint definitely wasn't so in the early 80s.
Frankly I think a console manufacturer should have the right to prevent non-licensees from releasing games for their system
Do you believe that Microsoft should control who develops for the Windows platform?
If people are upset enough about it to buy something that has no such restriction, someone will build a system that suits their needs.
Who is this "someone" you mention who sells an unrestricted console?
They were most productive at that time in history *because* their work was not yet considered protectable property by the government.
...we set them up the patent
You need to close your browser and go outside. While you're out there, try and get laid. You need it. Badly.
Digital storage and compression of electronicly taken pictures? Voyager? Viking? Etc... they weren't sending back cans of film from Mars or the outer solar system or developing the pictures in little onboard photo labs in the 70s. And compression was quite important given that your average deep space comm link isn't exactly high bandwidth.
Guess that Aerospace degree came in handy after all.
SCO sues Kodak for stealing their business model... Sigh. The only thing that stifles innovation is friviolous lawsuits over "intellectual property" and moronic patents.
...I should have said:
All your CCD are belong to us
We set them up the patent
I'm not sure when image compression entered the picture, but unless Kodak came up with it before 1981 and it took them until 1987 or longer to get the patent, it would appear that this constitutes prior art - by Sony themselves.
How obvious were these ideas in 1987?
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
I dunno, but this strikes me as the acts of a desperate company: http://afr.com/articles/2004/01/23/1074732570036.h tml
...I'm sure there are patents of Sony's that Kodak infringe upon, why didn't they just cross-license like the rest of the big boys do?
I am NaN
I work for Kodak. At least for the next few weeks until my division is 'divested'.
And it's pretty sad when you see all sorts of "HEY! We made that first" crap happen and the company lawyers don't go after the infringers. Thats *your* ideas, *your* work, and damnit if the courts didn't award *your* company the patent for it.
I won't speak to the Sony thing because I don't know the specifics, but I have heard many, many, many instances where Kodak should have, but didn't.
And you might remember a few years back a certain Polaroid case that ruled that even the *idea* was infringed, even if there were 600 people, 300 file cabinets, and an army of engineers waiting to patiently explain that the two systems were completely different. We lost that one- Pretty much everyone outside of the company that's spoke about that declares it a landmark case... that went the wrong way.
Kodak is claiming patentship on "electronic cameras that use compression and digital storage"?
Last I checked, most "electronic" cameras used film. I've only seen digital cameras use compression and digital storage. Might this be a potential loophole?
Seriously, though. Kodak needs ot have their asses thrown out of court for this: they're falling behind because they're not innovating, just like the music industry.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Why shouldn't Microsoft control who develops for Windows? It would just drive people to alternatives. And enough people aren't upset about console licensing to make it worth it to make an unrestricted console, which would cost more (because you couldn't recoup enough of your investment through licensing) so my point still stands.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... but I saw a digital camera that was dated circa 1976, the year I was born. So you only missed the boat by being about 14 years too late....
and its caused by the lens, not the CCD.
second one down
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I think it would be a clear example of groupthink moderation. Did anyone actually laugh at that, or was it more of an automatic "ah, there's the Dr. Evil joke" thing?
IR/Red penetrates deeper into the chip and 'spreads' out. A good IR filter would take care of that purple haze.
It could also be the wells filling and spilling over to the surrounding areas, or even a slow clock on some of the colour arrays.
(I type as I get up from the floor)
-Vendal Thornheart
Why shouldn't we jump to a conclusion by just reading the summary description? That is the first thing that ise used in the threat for a lawsuit. That is what the idiots that we sent to Washington did when they voted the I-CAN-SPAM act. I spoke with a few aides who said that the bill was not printed when they were rushed to vote for it, so they voted on the short title. Of course, they all should be shot for that. Did they learn this from /. or did we learn that from them?
Fight Spammers!
rarely was in the past. Especially if millions are spent figuring out what is 'obvious'.
-
... ed. But I Could be wrong, too. But damnit if that thing wasn't ancient looking- but it functiond and had 100K pixels? It was a pretty large number for the timeperiod.
Hell, I didn't think they knew what a transistor was when that thing was dated....
Of all manufacturers you've listed only Olympus uses Kodak CCD, and only in their E-1 camera. All consumer digicams use Sony CCDs (even Canon I believe), Nikon digital SLRs use Sony CCD, the word is, Minolta is going to use Sony CCD in their digital SLR, too. So the choice of the target is correct - Sony makes the majority of CCDs used in digital cameras today.
Of a failing company suing other people in the face of change. :(
Without the possibility of a patent to let a company make some money off of a new invention for a bit, very few companies would be willing to spend money on research and development. Yes, patents can be misused. But without patents you'd have a "free-rider" problem where everyone wants everyone else to put up the time, money, and resources to develop new things, so that they could then simply copy it. In such an environment, almost nobody will be willing to innovate.
The businesses that will die will be the ones who put money into R&D. That includes those who fund university research. I sincerely doubt in the environment you seem to want we would be able to innovate or create anything. However, since our forefathers got along fine with whale oil and candles, I guess we don't actually need too many of the innovations since then.
Jesus, dude, do you work for Kodak? Are you some sort of Kodak hired astroturfer? I've seen several of your replies in here apologizing for Kodak, and proclaiming all things Kodak to be the greatest thing ever. Give it a rest.
This is another bullshit patent -- put some memory on a camera: FUCKING BRILLIANT. It doesn't only appear obvious in retrospect, it IS fucking obvious. In essence it is "shrink the computer side down so it fits on the camera", and that is precisely what they've done, and it's an obvious progression that Kodak is trying to cash in on.
These patent claims bring a (somewhat) amusing anecdote to mind. Around 1990, I was working at Dell Computer as a wet-behind-the-ears engineer, when the company announced a "patent bounty" of $1,000 per filed application. "Cool!", thought I, as I hastened to write up patent disclosures on.....The patent committee at Dell was unimpressed. They didn't file the patent(s) I submitted
It may still be submissable as prior art if there are enough records and witnesses.
BTW, Didn't many of the space probes of the 70's and 80's have digital cameras?
Table-ized A.I.
The patent office has filed its share of awful patents.
I'm sure that's why. Start at the top.
is the Genesee
All of you posting about how kodaks camera's suck, note that that's equivalent to saying Intel is getting its ass handed to it in the OEM PC market, they ain't in it, they don't care. Although Kodak does make cameras, they make their money from the tech that drives everybody else's. Sony rolls their own, so they get sued.
I was working at Truevision in 1986 and I remember Sony bringing in a new Mavicam digital camera for us to play with.
It stored pictures on a little baby floppy. They were, as I remember, compressed RLE images that were 640x480 or maybe 512x486.
Can we just have a "companies in their death throws" category so I can check the little box that takes it off my frontpage?
Sony has been #1 since 1999 in digital cameras.
0 76_2.html
n News/ 20040217_strongsales.html
US market:
http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/040217/0132000
World market: Canon says they are #3.
http://www.usa.canon.com/templatedata/CanonI
I think it could be coming any day now.
"Um, doesn't that apply to all digital cameras?"
Um, yes. Um, they can choose who they, um, want to sue. Um, you see, it's called, um, "plaintiff chooses his remedy." Um, you're an idiot. Um. They don't have to sue everybody, um. They can, um, like sue just the person they, um, want to. Um, perhaps, like, um, they think like, um, Sony is, um, more like, likely to, um settle and stuff. And that, um, gives them, um, a chance to like, um, test out the, like, um, merits of their, um suit. Moron.
The patent system cannot be corrupt,
because it has no real power.
The patent offices do not decide on patents, they just file them and offer a preliminary filtering.
Refusing a patent needs considerably more efford than accepting it. You have to find a duplicate or you have to understand why it's obvious. For that you have to understand the patent and have a good knowledge of it's domain.
But patent offices are understaffed with too many applications coming in, so unless the guys who reads your patent treated a similar one just the day before, he will be unable to judge on prior art. Looking it up takes to much time and would delay the process even more. (I think it's at least 2 years today from filing a patent to getting it approuved) Therefor your patent is examinated out of context based only on the merrit of the textual application and when in doubt, it is accepted.
But this basicly just gives you the timestamp on the filing. Whenever there is a dispute, the validity of the patent must be resolved in court. That means that in addition to the money you pay for the patent, you must have enough money left to pay a lawyer to get it validated.
As patents have become the nukes[1] of the corporated world, there is a arms race between the big players. So whenever they have an idea, when in doubt, they file it. This just makes the already understaffed patent offices handle even more requests. And together with the "when in doubt, accept it", it creates even more questionable patents.
[1] - just like nukes, they can destroy your opponent. And just like nukes, their primary objective is not to be used, but to intimidate.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
The reason that it was eventually broken was because it had been misapplied. Selden's patent was for a machine that used a specific type of engine, and since Ford used a different engine (as did all other auto manufacturers), the patent really didn't apply. However, for many years Selden was able to convince every manufacturer (except for Ford) that he did own the patent for all automobiles.
I haven't read about the Selden Patent in quite some time. There are some obvious parallels with SCO and Linux (including the threats to sue end users!).
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Imagine that a slashdotter wrote one e-mail to a representative or a government body for every 20 posts he or she wrote here. Even better if a physical letter were sent through the mail.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
... its fuel of innovation and market share spent, and its core collapsing under its own weight, explodes as a SUPERNOVA. Expelling enormous gas clouds of lawsuits and IP claims with the brilliance of a trillion suns, Supernova EK2004 is dazzling observers the world over. Dr. Roland Smythe of the National Observatory commented, "This star was much larger than SCSO2003, which went supernova last year. But both are following the same progression and will soon be naught but a memory. Nonetheless, the data we've obtained from these two events will be studied for years to come." Indeed.
Okay, let's assume it's true: 'All your digital camera are belong to Kodak.' One question: Why wait so fscking long to enforce this?
Look, it's not as if Sony just started making digital cameras last week. I'm sorry but this just smacks of desperation here. First Kodak gets rid of their film camera biz, then they move to litigation. What this suggests is that they DO have more in common with SCO, the penultimate authors of books like 'Litigation, Profit, and YOU' and 'Sue Your Way to Financial Freedom'.
Kodak most certainly has a right to assert any reasonable claims but it's the TIMING I'm questioning here. I mean, didn't NASA have a hand in 'prior art?' After all, they've been sending compressed digital pics back from probes for a LONG time!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
resorts to lawsuits.
Can you code:
if $Kodak = 'SCO'
let $out_of_business = $Kodak
end-if
I knew you could.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I lreally like www.dpreview.com
They have many technical information regarding Digital Cameras.
They also have a little articel regarding KODAK vs. SONY here
ASDF ASDF ASDF ASDF ASDF ASDF
I'm very happy with my Kodak LS443 digital camera. Not only is the image quality excellent, but it also has a very nice LCD screen and awesome optical zoom. And at the time, it was a 4.0 megapixel camera selling for about the same price as most 3 MPs.
35 USC 102(b) establishes a statutory bar to obtaining a patent if the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States.
He's out of luck by more than 10 years. Also, 35 USC 102 (g) [same link as above] establishes that if two people invent the same thing, the later to file must show reasonable diligence from a time just prior to conception by another.
Again, I can find no information on this on the Net, but I remember that even with the huge settlement that they paid out, they still came out on top. Their customers, of course, were screwed as Kodak was prohibited from selling film for the cameras after the trial.
Does a company that so blatantly disregards other peoples rights deserve any itself? If they are willing to make illicit profits from someone else's patents, why should the government enforce theirs?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
When your business model fails, and your product becomes obsolete, claim ownership of the competitions product and then get really nasty lawyers to "prove" it.
SCO: 800-726-8649
Verisign: 800-361-8319, 888-642-9675
Diebold: 800-433-VOTE (8683)
A lot of these patents sound like what we cs nerds discussed at evening in the terminal rooms in the 80'ties. "If the trend of smaller disks continue, then one day you can put them everywhere, like in cameras. Compresses, there could be thousands of images. I don't want to carry around a hard-disc, we could do it today with static ram. In a few year it will be compact enough to store at least as many pictures as film." There was a lot of dicussion about what the net would mean, if everyone had access.
We did not think of ourselves as visionaries, we just average geeks who listed the obvious applications of the improved technology as idle speculation. Applications that was certain to come given the technology. The kind of application that should not be patentable, but has been because the patent system has failed on its purpose, namely to encourage people to disclose inventions that would otherwise be lost to society as a whole.
I believe the "hindsight" argument is overdone. If something is obvious in hindsight, in 99.81% of the cases it is also something many people would come up with once the technology was ready, and thus something that should not be patentable.
So often it seems when a company is getting near their last breath in their respective genre they spring to sue their competition in a desperate attempt.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
Plain and simple. That billionaire sold his stock, and now they need to drum up some real dough before the fiscal year is out. Snakes.
I do R&D in microelectronics. Most of the projects I work in involve an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, of equipment and manpower.
I think you are a bit naive, here. Hundreds of thousands of dollars barely pays for the costs of a patent, let alone any kind of significant R&D project.
When the final product comes out our profits are figured not only on production costs, but those development costs. If we did not have a patent for our devices, a week after we come out with a new product, another company would be able to sell the same product at a lower cost because they did not have to spend the money to do the development work. Hence anything they make over production costs will already be profit.
That's a completely naive analysis of cost structure. Even if the other company were completely copying your product, in addition to production, they would have to spend a lot of money on development and marketing, and reverse engineering is often more costly than just doing the research themselves.
Thus at least in my own specific experience (and yes, in my self interest, since I'd be out of a job) cutting edge technology would not be able to exist as it is today. There is no way we can just make small changes, because every little change we make means we have to retool at least some of the fab line. So when we turn out a new product, it has to be a significant step above what we previously had, to justify the expense of the changeover.
See, here you contradict yourself. On the one hand, you claim that your competitors can crank out copies of your products with no more than production costs, and on the other hand, you say that even small changes require you to "retool your fab".
The logial conclusion? Your company is uncompetitive and you are using patents to try to make up for the fact that your company doesn't know how to run its business and engineering operations. And what does that tell us? That your company should go out of business and be replaced by something more efficient. Too bad that, as you are telling us, your inefficient company has gotten 20 year monopolies that will let them continue to extort money from other, more efficient manufacturers until long after any of your company's R&D operations have shut down.
I suppose I could try to make a new device within the constraints of what we already have the capability of making. But in the competitive world that I live in, if we already have the capability to make it, chances are someone else has already done it.
Again, you are admitting that the patent system, for you, is not a way of encouraging innovation. Because if "someone else has already done it", it means that "it" is easy to do for lots of people and the patent system essentially becomes a lottery for who will win a monopoly for the next 20 years (only large companies with big legal staffs can enter that lottery, however).
I am not playing. This is my livihood we're talking about here. If we were not able to patent our products, I would not be able to go to my boss
You are just looking for the government to give your company a nice, guaranteed handout for the next 20 years because you have already told us that (1) your company is uncompetitive when it comes to manufacturing and (2) the things you "invent" are so simple that there are lots of other companies who could already be manufacturing them.
If we are going to give government handouts to research, let's do it more efficiently than the patent system: invest the money directly in research. That way, at least the technological advances that are made will be manufactured by efficient companies, not by companies like yours, which obviously seem to invest more in their legal staff than in their engineering staff.
And if we are going to give companies temporary monopolies, let's make them a more meaningful lifespan: to protect the kind of research that goes into your products (you yourself told us that your lifecycle is very short), 3-5 years ought to be sufficient.
Being in VLSI i agree with you. And I *do not* buy the arguments of Businesses will innovate faster. Hey guys. People who work are humans. What do you mean innovate faster. In the Semiconductor industry companies are innovating fast. Companies can spend upto 18% of their Revenue on R&D.
If you want a concrete example, here it is. TI came out with DLP(Digital Light Processing) tech. It cost a huge lot. And took years of development work . But it has started selling only now when the price of the chips has come down. Suppose there were no patents. Company X could have just taken that design, and would be able to sell the same at a much lower cost(No development costs).
In software things are a little different. In VLSI the costs needed are simply too huge. Just because there are a lot of stupid patents, it does not mean all patents are stupidMy Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
somehow they both still make money without one holding a patent on the "temporary storage space intended to be utilized by humans in an overnight capacity." and alot of patents are getting that broad nowadays.
Dang, I had mod points yesterday, and another batch about 3 days ago, where are they when I actually need them?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Let's face it, the patent system is quite broken. I would start with limiting patent life to 5 years. Plenty of time for a company to earn back their research. But short enough that they can't sit around and wait for the market to use the innovation and then pounce. Also a 5 year life will force more innovation, rather than stagnation. Obviously broad vague ideas or wishes shouldn't be patenable. Solutions should.
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If you really bother to read the patent, they're claiming a patent on image buffering and asynchronous processing (specifically, compression) in digital cameras. They spend the time to properly acknowledge prior art, and then clearly explain their additions.
This isn't a claim on all digital cameras (just a reminder for those who can't be bothered to process information outside of soundbites...). The patent application states many problems surrounding the issues of the time; among them are the availability of memory cards of any size (the biggest one they could find was 512K - not even big enough for a single 640x480x24 image).
Their negotiations with Sony probably revolve around either the buffering claim, the compression claim, or the removable memory card claim. Or mix-and-match. After three years of negotiations, they apparently decided a lawsuit was more profitable.
And as for Kodak being way behind the digital imaging game - ask yourself which camera has the highest current resolution. For 35mm, it's the Kodak DC14n at 13.7MP. For medium-format cameras, it's the Kodak DCS Pro Back at 16.6MP. I've been told they aren't the most reliable units on the market, but they are at the cutting edge of technology. Kodak realized it was losing the non-speciality film market (excepting one-shot cameras) many years ago. They've been thinking digital ever since.
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
I don't know about now, but 40 years and more ago if you shot movies in color and wanted them to last, you didn't use Eastman (Kodak) products. The dyes faded. The semi-archival product was Technicolor.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I agree. What is the patent office coming to? In the end, even though we don't like it, it is up to us Technocrats to start rallying to change things. We have the ability to ban together but do we have the desire?
looks like kodak is going to get others to pay for their lack of vision and execution.
For those who want to actually read the Kodak patents asserted against Sony, they are 5016107; 5164831; 5493335; 6292218; 4642678; 5373322; 5382976; 4660101; 6542192; and 6573927. Go to the PTO and search for each.
This makes is pretty clear to me that Kodaks patent should be invalidated. It is only common sense to use compression as file size grows. This is not a case of valuable research dollars being defended. Did they invent the compression that Sony is using? I don't think so. So where is the Kodak research in this area. What "work" did they do that Sony "stole".
It is a ridiculous farce that rewards people for putting the obvious in writing and filing it. Not true innovation.
http://www.digicamhistory.com/1980_1983.html Runs on batteries stores images on floppies.
I would have to disagree with you on this. At least in the consumer space, Kodak's digital cameras are very competitive on features and price, and are still quite popular. The latest Kodak innovations (picture dock, including a compact photo printer that has the printer dock on its top side) help reinforce that position.
I recently purchased a Kodak DX6490 (a 10x optical zoom camera with an SLR-style body and a 4 megapixel sensor), mainly based on my preference of its feature set, its preferred media (SD/MMC, which is also usable in Palm-branded PDAs), and reviews which compared the camera favorably against the Fuji Finepix S5000. And, oh yeah, good Mac OS X integration out of the box. So far, I've had no disappointments; even the movie clips the thing takes are excellent, for what they are.
Better quality camera and better quality pictures from a camera that's at a price point at-or-below the nearest competition? Yeah, I'd call that competitive.
Is there any real analysis (financial or otherwise) which would bear up your assertion that Kodak is "going downhill fast"? Or is this a blind assertion based purely on anecdotal "evidence"? Kodak and other companies of its ilk periodically go through phases where they trim the dead wood.
I suspect this "Kodak is going downhill fast" meme is much like the predictions of Apple's demise, which have been going steady for what, over a decade now?
They did report loses recently. Maybe they are just pursuing the SCO model of self preservation.
Kodak suffered a huge patent loss to Polaroid about 15 years ago. Kodak had to pay a large settlement to Polaroid, had to discontinue sale and production of their "instant camera" film, and gave significant discounts as compensation to the owners of suddenly obsolete Kodak cameras. Perhaps the pain of those events has encouraged Kodak to be more aggressive defending their own patents.
If your product was worth that much investment, there is no chance that a competitor would have a similar thing ready in one week. No way. If they did, that would mean your product was not worth that much investment anyway since it would be relatively evident to implement it.
The problem is that you are assuming that in a word without patents companies would develop products on the same way.
There are many things that would happen: one would be that innovation stalls compltely (unlikely, patents are a recent "innovation" and humanity innovated fine without them), in which case, we can always put them back in place.
Or companies would shift the risk of D&R to institutions with no interest in directly profit from discoveries or innovative implementations, like Universities or non profits financed by goverments and interested individuals and companies. Once they would find the cure for big feet, any interested company could commercialize the solution (lets say big shoes) and compete based on quality of service and costumer satisfaction. No wonder most companies find this freaking scary.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My feeling is that we must look to Japan when examining the Earliest History of the Digital Still Video Camera. I had recalled the Canon Ion from the late '80s.
"History and background of digital cameras
1. The first step was to improve the transmission from moon to earth antenna, researchers at NASA developed the methods that convert analog signals into digital information.
2. The second step was when Sony first demonstrated an electronic still camera using CCD in 1984. The name of the first digital still camera was 'Mavica.' This small toy uses 1.4 MB floppy diskette, and one-diskette stores twenty-five pictures."
FIRST INTERNET MENTION OF ELECTRONIC CAMERAS - 1984.
"In July, 1984, Canon conducted a trial of the RC-701 and an analog transmitter at the Los Angeles Olympics.
The Copal CV-1 electronic camera prototype - 1984.
HITACHI STILL VIDEO CAMERA PROTOTYPE - 1984.
PANASONIC PROTOTYPE ELECTRONIC CAMERA - 1984.
FUJI ES-1 - 1985. STill video camera.
KONICA SVC-20 - 1985. Prototype still video camera.
CANON RC-701 STILL VIDEO CAMERA - 1986. Canon was the first to market a still video camera, the professional model RC-701.
Canon's "RC-701" was the world's first commercial magnetic recording still camera."
SV Cameras Accessible to the General User
"In order to provide an affordable SV camera for general users, Canon set the price target that would not exceed 100,000 yen. The target was met by the release of the "RC-250 (Q-PIC)" in September 1989, whose price was 99,800 yen. The "RC-250 (Q-PIC)" had a built-in playback function. Connecting the camera to a television set with a video terminal, the user could easily view the pictures that had been taken. The camera with both "shooting" and "viewing" functions received much attention widely. The "RC-250" was a particular hit on the European market under the name of "ION."
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
> Think back to 1995 ... pretty much every digital camera was made by Kodak.
Yet if we go FURTHER BACK to 1986-1989 we find Canon's "RC-701" was the world's first commercial magnetic recording still camera; and that Canon's "RC-250 (Q-PIC)" ("ION" in Europe), released in September 1989, was the FIRST consumer-priced DSC.
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"