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Scribbling On Digital Photos
JagsLive notes a patent application filed in the US by Nokia for a way to 'scribble on the back' of digital photos. Nokia's approach is similar to the iPod's Cover Flow, except that Nokia users will be able to flip through their snaps, select one, and then turn it over and annotate the back just using SMS-like text entry. The scribble becomes an integral part of the saved photo.
An integral part of the photo, like Exif? Why didn't I think of that?
Perhaps they are patenting the GUI flip? No one has done that before, except a GUI for every OS years ago.
I know, it's a patent for a computer system that does all of the above! Brillian1.
Someone please end software patents.
Wow, that's novel.
How is this a novel invention? It sounds like little more than a graphical way to represent metadata.
If I had ever bought Nokia, I would stop now.
I seem to remember an experimental Linux desktop that allowed you to flip a window and annotate on the back.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Steg with a patent. Seems that even 5-year old ideas can be "new" when wrapped with juicy patent goodness!
Man, I thought we were past the days of "well established process" + "the internet" or + "a computer" = brand new shiny patent.
Clearly the patent office hasn't learned anything, and apparently we have yet to exhaust the pool of basic processes that can be "reinvented" for a computer. Sad.
Being able to attach descriptions to digital photos isn't a new concept. It may not have been done before on phones, but that's miles away from being significant enough to warrant a patent.
We've had this for years. It's called EXIF data and file comments. I doubt my sloppy handwriting adds value to the data.
Yes, this is crazy, but from reading the comments I think there are two things that need to be separated.
1) This is bad because there is massive prior art,
OR
2) This is bad because it is a patent on a software concept.
Which one is it? Number one seems to indicate legitimacy of the current patent system, and number two does not -- very different ideas, but I think slashdotters are conflating the two at the moment.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
This already exists as EXIF comments in the jpegs. I can add these remarks and sort them using the comments in most modern photo viewing programs.
The only "innovation" I can see here is the fact it makes a nice animation flipping the photo over. Hardly patent-worthy.
Seriously, we need to have people that grant patents with some experience in the field they're granting patents.
laws, but in regards to software patents, I have to agree with you. I remember a day when software was covered by copyright and only copyright. So, if you could do the same function, only with completely different code, you had no problem. Of course now, with patents, "Hello world" could have been patented when it was first written. Or to extrapolate to physical inventions, Diesel would have run afoul of the internal combustion engine patents - if he didn't when he came out with his invention - my business history is a little fuzzy in this area.
Hey, it's a great idea! Photographers especially are going to love it. They'll be able to jot down the f-stop, aperture, time, date, camera, lens, whether they used a flash... you could even tag your photo with GPS coordinates! Imagine the possibilities!
Er, or go to Flickr and look at them realized.
that we as creatures still crave tangible comforts like scribbling. er, can be exploited to use it at all. there are far more efficient and powerful ways of tagging images in cyberspace (relational databases, embedded data, etc...) but we still crave the outmoded.
perhaps its why things like fax machines and notaries still persist today. if anything, this just shows nokia is pedaling us backwards at an ever faster rate.
I'm really afraid to know that I could get a bus or a metro and to be next to one of these evil genius patent trolls.
the future, is NOW!
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Spore beat them to it, and of course others too. Spore's png files also has the creature's save file in it as well, probably located just beyond the end of the file png's file. You can literally drag and drop a png picture from a webpage into spore and it'll add it.
Hardly a novel idea. Pretty much any combination file type encompasses this patent. Adding text to a picture is by far the most basic usage possible.
Until it can make 8x10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was...
AND
output to a braille tty, well then, I'm just not interested.
man, I feel like mold.
It says "SMS-like text entry". Maybe they're enforcing text-speak :-)
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
the future, is YEARS AGO!
Fixed that for you. :)
How about somebody give the dust time to settle on this thread and then send it to the USPTO for their enlightenment?
So correct. I slapped together a scribble application in a matter of hours just a month ago and thought nothing of it. Admittedly it was for fire inspections on the Pocket PC so they could jot down the location / rough floor-plan of certain items, but it isn't that much of a stretch to apply it here. This does not fit into the 'not obvious to someone skilled in the art' clause of getting a patent at all.
What does it look like? A 3D animation of a photo flipping over? Amazing how a tech bubble can make the smallest piece of software be worth billions & billions of dollars and employ thousands of people.
Now, if they had allowed scribbled "ink" to be stored in the EXIF, that might be interesting. Yes, you could see how to do it: take the ink bitmap or vectors for the annotation, uuencode or otherwise mime-like wrap it, and then stick that into the EXIF. But have you actually done it? That's non-trivial and non-obvious (until it's described). That would have been interesting. I just hope this posting serves as prior art to kill any such filing in the future.
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What I'd rather have is voice recognition in the phone that will annotate the photos for me. *snap* "Goose Rock Beach at sunset." *snap* "That tea shop on Front that I want to check out later." etc.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Every software company that has an 'idea' will file a patent with the knowledge that the USPTO has so many idiots working for it that it would grant a patent for a 'character-based communication system comprised of a graphite based inscription utensil and fibrous, cellulose based, recording medium'.
Sig this!
Whether we like them or not, software patents have become a familiar and potentially damaging part of the legal landscape.
Nokia obviously want to use this feature in their software, and don't want to be sued. Nobody else has staked out a claim for this particular concept, so Nokia filed a patent. If it's granted, Nokia get to use this feature and can claim a little bit of money from anyone else who chooses to do so. If it's knocked back on the grounds that it's obvious or that there's prior art and it's therefore unpatentable, then Nokia still get to use that feature without the risk of being sued. They win either way.
The very first thing which came to my mind is PalmOS. Its media viewer allows one to add a comment to the picture (saved in an annoying non-standard format; why can't it use EXIF?), by simply chosing "Info" on the menu while viewing it and filling the comment field. And you can even say it's "scribbling", since it's Graffiti 2.
It doesn't have a flip effect, but adding a flip (or worse, rotating cube) effect to something shouldn't be enough to make it original.
An integral part of the photo, like Exif? Why didn't I think of that?
Perhaps they are patenting the GUI flip? No one has done that before, except a GUI for every OS years ago.
I know, it's a patent for a computer system that does all of the above! Brillian1.
Someone please end software patents.
First off, this is a patent application. That means it has not been granted yet. Second, I don't believe the problem is cause by software patents. The problem is that the examiners at the USPTO have very little time (I think less than a day per application) to decide whether to grant it or not. That usually isn't enough time to decide if there is prior art. Of course, this "invention" seems pretty obvious to everyone here. But who knows what kind of background the examiner has...
So my point is that there may be other issues with software patents but your complaint that this is obvious isn't a problem with only software patents. It's a problem with the entire system that can be fixed only by giving the USPTO more resources.
I am intrigued by you application of the Exif-comments tag for the use of comments and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Exactly what I was thinking. Oh, and of course, I was also thinking that the place to do this is on REAL CAMERAS, not crappy cell phone cameras. Have a touch screen on the back of your DSLR and write with a stylus. That would actually be useful. This is a complete and utter waste of the patent office's time and energy.
Basically, this is a beautiful, easy-to-understand example of why software patents are inherently wrong. First, it ensures that a potentially useful technology will only be available on the most utterly useless hardware. Second, it stifles further innovation in this area and harms the market as a whole by producing a host of competing standards that will not be interoperable. Third, it harms the public good by denying them access to what appears to be nothing more than a trivial lipstick-on-a-pig treatment to the EXIF comment tag because most people are locked into their phones and couldn't switch to Nokia even if they wanted to. Finally, it guarantees that few peope will bother to use the technology even on Nokia handsets because the people they send the photos to won't be able to decode the notes....
Repeat after me: Thou shalt not patent thine file formats, nor thine XML dialects, nor thine EXIF tags.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If every patent APPLICATION was put up on a public web-site, with ANYONE able to post a link+comment to prior art, THEN the patent system might be able to cope. ( there'd need to be a Vote Up / Vote Down system, too, so that spammers/astroturfers couldn't render the system utterly bogged )
IT ISN'T POSSIBLE for the patent examiners to wade through thousands of pages of research every hour, to decide if the current application is negated by prior art.
It isn't even possible for patent examiners to DISCOVER which thousands of pages of research to look into!
Change The Algorithm, Not The Implementation!
Let US ( anyone, anywhere in the world ) do the searching, let them simply *judge* the validity of the application.
Several phones, such as the V 402-SH (from year 2004) enabled the user to annotate pics shot via the phone. That is only halfway to the other side of the photo. Sharp also had in Dec 04 cellphones with haptics, with auto rotating displays, and with displays that turned silver ro normal an Harajuku girls could pretty-up without looking for a separate mirror. I saw/felt these first-hand in Tokyo. The USPTO better wake up and stop taking greed money, or else...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This was in Sun's LookingGlass interface already. (Among other things.)
Too many patent lawyers, too few salt-covered bullets.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
why uuencode or mime? exif can contain binary blobs. see jpeg thumbnails.
But Nokia is so short sighted. Far too attached to the physical world. I will at once file a patent for displaying different data depending on how the photo was flipped. Left to right, right to left, up/down, down/up and of course depending on the weekday and the current moon phase. Oh boy I will be soooo rich.
Indeed, I think they have just patented a methaphor.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Besides, I can very well see being exciting virtually flipping my first 10 "photographs" to "see" what is written on the "back".
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
twitter It's rather amazing the resources devoted to trolling isn't it? It's like someone's full time job.
Priceless.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
http://slashdot.org/~willyhill/journal/205317
Maybe I missed it in the patent text, but this would be much more interesting if it was a way of inserting metadata by minutely altering encoding of a jpeg image. There's plenty of room for noise in a jpeg file, and this way the pictures could be posted and copied elsewhere whilst maintaining the notes *and* compatibility.
It just requires a new plug in to make the gui do a flip and display an empty sheet of paper with textures and all.
Nokia; simplicity at management level.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I think we're all agreed that this is an absolute non-idea (displaying metadata - WOW!!!). But the post doesn't say that - it's reported as though it might be of interest to slashdotters. I'm intrigued because it was also reported in New Scientist as though it was some kind of big new idea and I thought exactly the same thing when I read it there - WTF!! Is it a plant by some tricksy press department or something?
It's a problem with the entire system that can be fixed only by giving the USPTO more resources.
or getting rid of software patents ?
Rich
Close. They're enforcing LOLspeak. We'll have LOLCats, LOLBrats, LOLandscapes, LOLis-this-thing-on, LOLflowers, and (of course), LOLporn.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
This sounds like an overall bad idea. Having comments ("scribbles") attached to a picture is a great idea. We've already got that - the exif comments field.
Now why take a good idea like having comments with a picture, and apply a physical restriction like flipping the picture over? By making people flip the picture over, they're making it impossible to see the comments and also see the picture at the same time.
While it is a 'known' metaphor from the physical world, it's a bad one that restricts usability. Just print the comments below the picture like every web album already does.
I would not say it is so bad as you make it sound. It is just another type of eye-candy like transparent or wobbly windows. Some like things like that, others hate them. Nevertheless, trying to patents this is ridiculous.
The problem is that so many software patents try to protect end results, rather than the specific process. "Tagging of digital photographs by insertion of data at $point in $process manner" might be patentable, if it's unconventional and non-obvious. "Tagging digital photographs with short text strings" is not patentable.
An analogy might be a patent on "converting stored chemical energy into rotary mechanical power by combustion", which would basically cover steam engines, turboshafts, internal combustion/diesel engines, etc. The patent tries to cover everything that gives you a desired result, rather than the specific process by which it is acutally done.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
IPTC already allows you to do this. And it's well supported in lots of different apps - Irfanview, GIMP, Photoshop ...
Oh, and of course, I was also thinking that the place to do this is on REAL CAMERAS, not crappy cell phone cameras. Have a touch screen on the back of your DSLR and write with a stylus. That would actually be useful. This is a complete and utter waste of the patent office's time and energy.
But that's already been done on real cameras, so you would have to be really sleazy to try to get a patent on that. Now, doing this on cell phone cameras, that's clearly a new invention.
don't want to be sued
well THERE's your problem.
maybe if we could find a way to stop bullshit lawsuits, we would be able to find a way to stop bullshit ways to stop bullshit lawsuits.
How is this different, other than in hand-waving verbiage, than the comments you could add/embed in a GIF?
mark
The first time I got a digital camera and started worrying about tagging, I found that the click-around alphabetically method was too awkward for jotting down contextual data, so I got a good tool for doing it during import.
Maybe a small (perhaps even wireless) phone-like keyboard could do the trick?
and (of course), LOLporn.
im in ur vag1na makin ur babiez
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
No, this is eye-candy that specifically separates the photo from the comments, making sure that no matter how big of a monitor you have you cannot see both critical elements at once. As such, it is broken.
Or a smart phone or PDA (or notebook) with a wifi connection and a wifi card for the camera.
Most people seem fairly happy with tagging their photos after they're transferred to their computer though.
Thanks, Rich, for the latest blurb to come out of the Department of Redundancy Department. I don't believe that anyone had mentioned the possibility of eliminating software patents before GP responded with his own take on the subject. Just incredibly useful.
Non-obvious? How? Doing this (the simplest thing) avoids them having to interpret your scrawl, and use the thumbnail functionality built into the exif format.
Maybe you just aren't a good judge of triviality...
How is this different, other than in hand-waving verbiage, than the comments you could add/embed in a GIF?
It's not. It's just a user interface to a comment field. A user interface that's got prior art in Croquet and Project Looking Glass.
You are taking up precious oxygen. Can you please correct that problem at once? Thx.