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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.
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...
Besides that, Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Olympus and many others use Kodak CCD chips in their cameras. Sony uses Sony chips in their cameras.
Say what you want about obvious patents, but Kodak is no SCO - they aren't desperate or stupid enough to sue their own customers.
Edith Keeler Must Die
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?
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.
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();}
You can patent something that would be obvious if the reason behind it isn't. So did they compress the images so they didn't use so much memory or did they compress them because they wanted to export them as jpeg to be standard or some other reason? A 3rd reason could make the patent valid even if the other two are obvious.
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...
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?'
Actually Kodak patented "You push the button we'll do the rest" a hundred years ago. I think Amazon has some 'splaining to do....
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.
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.
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!
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
Maybe they'd be doing sony a favor by forcing them to use Kodak CCDs. I have a friend who bought a Sony. He's getting weird purple fringing in backlit areas of his images.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
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'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.
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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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!
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.
That tired joke got modded up not because it's almost chuckle-inducing, but because it's social commentary. The funny part is that the idea is blindingly obvious and shouldn't be worth (puts pinky to lips) one million dollars. The sad part is that, yes, it is.
I can't find a concrete reference, but I believe that Canon ships more units and grosses more than Sony.
I did too read the patent (look elsewhere in the comments for a link to it), and I stand by my opinion that it's stupid. The patent seems to be the result of someone thinking of a digital camera, and a group of engineers brainstorming ways it could be made. "It'll have, like, a CCD, and an ADC, and removable media. Or maybe it'll have an indicator saying how much space is left on the removable media." All this is converted into legalese. They don't describe how the parts will be combined, or how the parts work. And if you had asked me, in 1991, to describe how to make a digital camera, I could have brainstormed those things. In short, they didn't do anything, certainly not something worth a million bucks. And see my other post for why it was obvious even when it was patented.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.