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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.
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?
True enough, assuming a spurious lawsuit.
However, if you had tremendous amounts of R&D money invested, and someone else was turning your effort into market share and killing you, you might fail to detect humor in the situation.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I was about to say the same thing along the lines of "Doesn't it sound a bit familar that when a company discovers that its business model is based upon an obsolete technology that is leading them them to bankrupcy, they decide to sue the biggest of the companies that are using the new technology."
Although unlike sco I think that Kodak is probably looking for a buyout. Good idea really. Kodak's brand is still the largest consumer brand. I can easily see us all buying sony camera's in the future that include "Kodak Colormatch technology" or whatever new tech they want to associates with Kodak's old film brand image (no pun intended).
-?-
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();}
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.
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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
That situation is never funny, but not all bad situations should lead to litigation. You may have spent millions in R&D, but were you working on something non-obvious?
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.
If this were the case, then the blame would fall squarely on your shoulders for poor execution. Kodak had products based on outdated technology, and did the research for new technologoy but did not bring it to market fast enough (perhaps to milk the film products for all they are worth). If Sony managed to bring newer technology to the market faster, Kodak deserves to lose market share because of this.
This is just competition. When businesses compete, they compete in technology, marketing, price, time to market and other aspects. Kodak should have been out their making products using their R&D, not sitting on their butts working on licensing agreements. They had a better idea of the market because they had several products out there, and we know now that they had the technology for the next generation of products as well, but when Sony beat them to it and made better products because Kodak weren't competitive enough, they want to litigate?
That's why patents are stupid. If you do the R&D, keep it a trade secret until you are ready to release the product and then use the revenue from that product to innovate the next one. That how you beat your competitors, not by sitting on your laurels. If you aren't willing to replace your own products with better ones, other people will do it for you.
Perhaps for individual inventors, patents might make sense, because individual inventors have to overcome the barriers of entry in markets. But the current patent system itself creates a huge barrier of entry... 10K for a patent? Gimme a break.
Perhaps the best thing to do to the patent system is to "open source" it. Basically, anyone can apply for a patent. The docs are posted online. The patent is valid until someone demonstrates why it is obvious, or has been done before (exactly or in another medium). No patent examiners and no lawyers are needed in the application process. If there is a dispute, a judge looks over the body of comments and decides whether the patent is legit. (The judge's involvement invariably happens with current patents anyway, except that right now the judge does not have any peer-review comments to look over, just those submitted by the disputers).
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.
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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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.
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.