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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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