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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?"
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.
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?
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
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
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();}
sure, if there were a big benevolent dictator in the sky that could decide what "should" be done with the money...
Paraphrasing Socrates, you had better figure out that you don't know much. None of us does. Thus, the only way that we figure out is through competition. In the marketplace, in ideas, in biological evolution, in almost every area.
This is just part of that market competition. It may seem wasteful because the amounts are high. But what you aren't seeing is that they are fighting to determine the efficient outcome at a larger scale...
An obvious idea cannot be patented. 'Obvious' means that a person of average skill in the art could have independently formulated the idea without knowledge of the "invention" on which the patent is being filed. "The art," in this case, means the art of camera design.
It doesn't strike me as a great leap that an experienced photographer or optics guy living in the year 1991 with even a reasonable degree of computer knowledge would have been able to foresee the digital camera. Sure, he might not have known about JPEG compression or Secure Digital cards, but CCD arrays were around long before 1991, as were flash memory and good image compression.
So, with your prior art and with much like it, this patent may well be unenforcable. At least the patent is old enough that we can't shake our heads at this patent as yet another side-effect of the recent patent frenzy. It's a simple case of a patent examiner sleeping on the job, or not being creative or imaginative enough to realize what's obvious and what isn't.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
Under the Instrument Description section, it says the cameras are 'vidcons' (also user by mariner). That is, they use television cameras, as you said, but the cameras collect photons directly, without an intermediate film stage.
It sounds like an "electronic camera" to me! Also, the space craft have on board digital storage (presumably magnetic core?) and used compression for the Uranus flyby in 1986. An electronic camera and digital storage were paired well before the craft's launch in 1977. Compression, was used for the 1986 fly by of Uranus, so a combination of 'electronic camera, digital storage and compression' had no doubt been designed and tested well before 1986.
I'll bet similar systems were also in place on earth bound telescopes.
Purple fringing (one kind of chromatic aberration) is almost always due to poor optics, not poor electronics. Lens materials refract light differently based on the wavelength; bad optics don't take this into account as much as good optics. Bad optics let the wavelengths fall on the sensor in different places, and good optics judiciously use coatings and additional elements to re-form the multiple waveforms into a coherent image.
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Here is an interested tidbit from parent link:
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The problem with the available techniques is their focus on real-time throughput. The present invention departs from this focus by distinguishing the input function of the camera from the processing function so that, on the one hand, image signals from a plurality of still images accumulate at a rate commensurate with normal operation of the camera while, on the other hand, the accumulated image signals are digitally processed at a throughput rate different than the accumulating rate. The prior techniques tend, by nature of their focus upon speed, not only to direct compression choices to those capable of handling a data stream at an extremely fast rate, such as differential pulse code modulation (DPCM), but also tend to focus processing upon one image at a time. By providing a multi-image input buffer and separating digital processing from input requirements, the digital processor not only has more time to operate on blocks of image signals, in particular transform encoding the blocks of signals, but also obtains such processing advantages without disturbing the "stacking up" of images in the input buffer. The invention further utilizes a removable digital storage means, such as a SRAM memory card, to store the compressed image signals. With 10:1 compression, for example, the byte requirement for a picture can be reduced by a factor of ten and many more images can be stored in the memory card.
If Sony does not want to pay royalties, then simply use the older approach and make up for the difference in other ways.
Table-ized A.I.
The only thing I was "making fun of" was that people automatically assume that their statements are true without evidence. There is absolutely no evidence that patent protection encourages innovation. You can't point to the status quo because there's nothing to compare against.
We could as easily be at the same place,better off or worse off without patent protection but unless things change drastically we will never know.
I personally have an affinity to the "future" I wrote about but I'm not stupid enough to try to just thrust that situation on the world. First patents and copyrights need to be severely restricted. Put things back to where they were in the 1700's. Once people realize that the sky isn't falling than you start reducing it further.
Lastly, I want to note that even if not having patent protection reduced innovation that this would not aprior be a bad thing. We assume it is because we have all this stuff, we're geeks, we love this sort of thing. But would the world itself be worse off? Innovation may be reduced but it would never quit, humans simply can't help themselves. Some generation would have all this "stuff" but maybe they would be more prepared for it. Maybe we'd have more cooperation rather than so much antagonism. As well with designer babies right around the corner I'm not sure that humans are ready for it.
I have no answers to my last suppositions, just pointing out that many people automatically label something that is completely different as "bad" without contemplating the idea that it would simply be different.
Sure information wants to be free, but how much are you willing to pay for the packaging?
The argument as to whether Patents hinder or encourage innovation is difficult to prove. All one can say is that the industrial revolution Watt Stevenson etc innovated enormously in the nineteenth century without the benefit of our current IP infrastructure. And the swiss managed to build their entire nineteenth century pharma industry while resisting patent law until 1906(?)
But essentially it keeps lawyers off the street and that may be a worthwhile social goal.