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Adobe Blasts Nikon's Closed File Format
Joe Decker writes "Thomas Knoll, creator of Adobe Photoshop,
blasts Nikon's use of encryption to limit access to white-balance information contained in D2X RAW images files. Fearing the DMCA, Adobe won't reverse-engineer the file, slightly reducing Photoshop's support for those files.
Nikon responds. Is Adobe whining? Is Nikon shooting itself in the foot?" We've covered this previously.
NEF file formats will continue to have support in Adobe Photoshop as a plugin. This is the current state of NEF processing, it will continue to be so in the future.
The Nikon SDK that permits decoding of the format is still available to 3rd parties.
In short, it's the same as it ever was.
If the licensing is so heinous that an open source project can't accept it, then perhaps the problem isn't on the Nikon side, but in the perception and conception of how licensing should work on the part of the project team.
They're a US company; the same way that soliciting somebody to commit a crime is (usually) criminal, I'm assuming they'd also be found to be guilty in a civil court when the DMCA is broken.
It is ironic that Adobe mocks Nikon for their closed file format, while they are guilty of suing a person who reverse-engineered their precious format in the past. It would be fun if Adobe try to reverse-engineer their format and Nikon would respond by throwing one of their engineers into jail.
Word of mouth is an amazing thing. I bought a digital camera a couple years ago. After reading a lot of web sites, I choose a Canon G5. Since I'm the go-to guy in my circle when it comes to tech purchases, I've convinced at least 5 or 6 friends to purchase Canon digital cameras. Choose with your feet and tell others to do the same. As a group we've got a lot of power.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
first its just an encryption.. and for later i expect they'll apply public-key for camera too.. and maybe, just maybe, then digital format photo can be accepted in court as evidence
http://aip.corolla.or.id/
You dick, how the fuck do you pirate your own material? Guess what, when you click the button on the camera, the image you take is yours, not Nikons. Its nothing to do with ethics, they'd do it if it weren't for the DMCA.
Jonathanjk.com
Nikon has competition, Adobe just bought theirs out. Who do you think will suffer over a format tussle?
Jonathanjk.com
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
You need to sign an NDA to get hold of it, so it won't be redistributable and most users are going to have to just disable its use when building the program. It probably only includes binaries for Windows/x86, anyway.
There would be no question that Adobe is a "bona fide software developer", and would be able to get their hands on the SDK. The good news is that they are refusing to sign up for it - They are determined to get the information out in the public domain, legaly.
For this, they should be praised. IMHO.
Adobe don't claim any rights on the settings you apply to images created with Photoshop. Whilst file formats are often proprietary, or are open to a limit expressed by API documentation (is .psd an open format ? Could Capture Read / Write .psd ? I think so...) here .NEF is replacing film. Did Nikon own your processed film ? Seems like commercial suicide to me - they're in danger of making their products extremely unattractive to advanced users.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
>Fortunately, outside the Land Of The Free(tm),
>anyone can access Nikon's encrypted data with a
Considering it is NOT Nikon's data, I don't see the problem to start with.
Well, this is certainly an ironic twist. Adobe should have lost its right to complain about the DMCA when it created the Dmitry Sklyarov incident, creating the first and still most ominous DMCA-related precedent for the use of criminal charges for what are fundamentally business problems and civil matters...
Adobe CREATED this and now wants protection from it. That's kinda funny. I don't care so much about white balance. The other issue in this matter is much more interesting.
Thing is, the CD's she had with her that she'd got with the camera, were full of crippled software - "lite" versions you have to purchase the full version, etc
This is the crap I hate. You buy some nice piece of hardware that seems like it _should_ work just spiffy on its own, but the truth is you have to use someone's proprietary software or go searching for a hack to make it work. It's maddening.
Other things in this category: My daughters' iPod. Yeah, I know y'all love iTunes and I know that it doesn't suck, but maybe you can cut me some slack in the fact that I happened to choose a different package for my MP3 library before getting her the iPod. Now I have this incompatible mess. I could just switch to iTunes throughout the house, but why should I have to make that choice just to put a stupid MP3 file on her player?
My cell phone has this nice memory card that I need synch software in order to access. Yeah, I can store and use a gig of data, including MP3s, software, books, etc, but I can't access it on any computer that doesn't have ActiveSync. Why?
I'm sick of it. Maybe these folks think they're helping me out by including their crappys software or maybe they're just doing it to lock me in. Either way, it makes me, the consumer, wary of buying their products. That can't be something they actually like.
TW
The PDF standard IS open and published. Adobe commissioned the standard so it could get it's foothold in the fonts. It actually likes what is happening with PDF
PDF - It Just Works.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Not only DVD Jon, but the Adobe e-book case and the BNetD case (which is currently standing in favor of Blizzard while it's under appeal) come to mind.
Wouldn't the same go for reverse engineering word documents ? The encoding is theirs, but the content is mine.
You bring up a good point, despite the unnecessary cussing. The DMCA only applies to things that are "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under" the copyright laws (other provisions are similar, IIRC). To what copyrighted-work does this encrption scheme limit access? It can't be the photographs . . . Nikon did not contribute in any way. It can't be the camera's firmware . . . how does the this encryption scheme limit when/where/how offen you can access that work?
I'm not a photography buff. Perhaps somone who uses this stuff can explain.
PhotoShop CS2 lists for $599. I think Adobe could probably afford to pay the licensing that Nikon is asking for, rather than just complaining about it to the media. Sorry if I'm not sympathetic to a multi-billion dollar corporation having to deal with another multi-billion dollar corporation's licensing fees.
XeoMage
If I took the photograph isn't the data mine? Not Mine and NIKONS... Shouldn't I be able to control what parts are encrypted and what parts aren't, so I can get the best posible image/color/detail out of the photograph.
There should be no fear of decrypting this data. Didn't I create that file? Isn't the data even though encrypted mine?
I can't even think of an analogy. Even MS with its word file format, won't document how it works but isn't so evil as to encrypt it.
This is bad form and is another strike against Nikon.
Sex with minors is legal in certain countries, yet if you leave the US for that purpose, you can be arrested, charged and imprisoned for that act, despite the fact that the sex would be fully legal in the other country.
I don't think adobe is whining. I believe that a photographer that buys Photoshop will expect it to work with his camera out of the box. When he install it and discover that the raw do not work, he will be very frustaded, and possibly ver angry with (guess who?) Adobe.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
What, exactly, has happened with PDFs that Adobe doesn't like?
Hell, they've managed to make most people think you need horribly expensive "Distiller" software, when they could just use GhostScript and PDFCreator. What a racket...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
They could certainly simply reverse-engineer the format and fight it out in court. But they're kind of in a bind because they like broad applications of the DMCA and don't want to weaken it.
It's unlikely white balance information is copyrightable at all. Which means decrypting it isn't bypassing a technological measure protecting a copyrighted work, which means the DMCA doesn't apply. In any case, the white balance information in a photo isn't copyrighted _by Nikon_ (unless a Nikon employee took the picture), so Adobe could probably get any case dismissed for lack of standing.
It's amusing to see Adobe hoist by its own petard. And even more amusing to see that the format (including encryption) has been reverse-engineered, and will be supported by open-source tools.
> If Nikon starts to kick up dust, I'm just going to
> take my business to Canon.
Well YOU can, but the huge pool of pros and serious amateur photographers won't, because they're already too heavily invested in Nikon gear. The D2X and its brethren aren't point-and-shoot cameras that can simply be swapped for Canon gear: people often have thousands of dollars worth of lenses that would also have to be replaced. I'm not a pro, but even my Nikon optics+camera are worth more than my car.
Nikon knows this.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Nikon might want to consider publishing their format. But it it truly just image information? I thought there was some internal state information included. This might be simply a way to protect their complete 'system,' whose borders reach beyond the physical camera, to the export of jpeg and tiff. It really is their format, after all. Positive persuasion is more appropriate here, not demonization.
I just looked at dcraw.c and the parts pertaining to parsing Canon's white balance info simply use the camera model name to determine where in the RAW file Canon put the WB. Hardly "encryption", it's just an offset that varies by format.
Canon appears to develop a unique RAW file format by camera model. That makes a "tiny" bit of sense in that each file can accurately describe precisely the data the camera is capable of producing. It makes it harder in the long run to support dozens of file formats, but that's a trade-off Canon appears to be willing to live with. Keep in mind that Canon has to eat their own dogfood, too -- every format they produce means a new software release to parse the RAW files. And Canon doesn't charge for these downloads -- once you've bought their camera, it comes with software and upgrades (so far) have been free. So there's no real economic incentive for them to continue this, but they do.
What I think is most important regarding this issue is that it's simply a tempest in a teapot, being stirred by Adobe for their own political reasons. First, it's only on a single high-end pro camera -- affecting only a select set of professional photographers, most of whom have never heard of Open Source. Second, it's only white balance information. It's what the photographer told the camera about "white" or "gray" at the time of the shot, but it doesn't change the underlying image data. It's nothing that can't be recovered in the digital darkroom during processing. Finally, the encryption is trivial to break -- Adobe is raising a ruckus claiming the DMCA is preventing reverse engineering. In reality, most Open Source developers would simply ignore the DMCA and perform the decoding anyway.
In the camera world Nikon stands alone in this stupidity, but it's really too small of a matter to concern any of us, (unless you're looking for a DMCA poster child to nail to the wall.)
John
Somebody who can, say, afford to buy Macromedia is much more likely to get slapped with a giant lawsuit.
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
Which is.... not copyright.
You still own the copyright, even if you need to make agreements to use the photographs commercially.
It's called reality.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Adobe is raising a ruckus claiming the DMCA is preventing reverse engineering.
I thought it was Nikon that raised the ruckus by threatening Adobe with it.
Either way, it being trivial to break isn't going to be a winning arguement in court. Indeed, trivial encryption is exactly what the DMCA was made for. Strong encryption doesn't need to be protected by law.
Honestly, I hope Adobe is successful in stirring things up around this. If it actually goes to court there stands a very good chance of a bit of the DMCA being chipped away, since it's actually the end user who owns copyright on the data being encrypted.
Trivial or not, Nikon needs to be kicked in the head.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Professionals, as in all disciplines, will use the best tool for the job. If that tool happens not to be photoshops converter - so be it.
And if the reason the best tool is Nikon's tool is not that Nikon's tool is any good, but that Nikon are using legal threats to prevent anyone writing a better tool than theirs - so be it?
Whether it's Adobe that writes it, or Nikon - doesn't matter.
No. What matters is that anyone who can write a better one has the right to do so. Nikon have written a mediocre tool, and are preventing anyone writing a better one by threatening them with the DMCA - and that does matter.
The copyright and patent systems were supposed to ensure that if you invent a better mousetrap, you won't instantly be crushed by a big mousetrap maker stealing your idea. They weren't supposed to ensure that the big mousetrap makers could get away with selling crap mousetraps by suing anyone who invented a better one for violating their patents on the anatomy of the mouse itself...
A lot of people don't seem to understand why the white balance has value to a professional photographer. When you shoot RAW, you can completely correct for ambient lighting after the fact by adjusting the white balance, and without any loss of quality.
Even just for "pro-sumer" cameras, this feature is great when working with ambient light.
Nikon has not asserted any ownership of your images. This outcry has come from the general bitching that everyone has with the encryption issue. Everyone's falsely concluding that just because something is encrypted in the file that that means that Nikon owns your image. How absurd is that! My guess is that there's more than just white balance that is encrypted in the file.
Yes, let's get the facts straight:
1. Nikon has obfusticated some of the data I produce with their camera.
2. Nikon tells me this is for my own good.
3. Nikon has restrictions on it's SDK such that despite your assertations it is not for the asking, otherwise Bibble and Capture One would have licensed them. And as an end user, even in Japanese-English I am not a "bona fide" developer. I am a person who diddles with writing their own software for their own purposes.
4. Under DMCA provisions, it is illegal for to reverse engineer the data I produce with the camera.
5. Nikon sells a product called Capture, that performs extremely poorly and essentially cripples a computer from doing anything but run Capture while it is in batch operation.
I never said Nikon owns my image per se, but instead they own the key to my white balance data, which is carefully set by me when I am out shooting. Since I use the Preset WB, why would I want anything but "as shot" -- after all, using an ExpoDisc, I set it correctly in the field.
In other words, MY DATA is the white balance information. It is as integral to the photograph as the image itself. Nikon is telling me that I cannot easily or freely access my data. They say that they have the key and I cannot have it.
Have you even looked at the PDF specification? If not, how can you make comments about the format?
What's clumsy and bloated is Acrobat Reader. My guess is that more free *nix users like PDF because the PDF tools available on *nix aren't bloated and crappy like Acrobat Reader is.