Slashdot Mirror
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?
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();}
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.
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.
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.
[