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Kodak Sues Apple & RIM Over Preview In Cameras
Dave Knott writes "Kodak is suing Apple and Research In Motion over technology related to digital cameras in their iPhone and BlackBerry smart phones. The complaint specifically relates to photo preview functionality which Kodak claims infringes on their patents. The company is asking for unspecified monetary damages and a court order to end the disputed practices. Kodak has amassed more than 1,000 digital-imaging patents, and almost all of today's digital cameras rely on that technology. Kodak has licensed digital-imaging technology to about 30 companies, including mobile-device makers such as LG Electronics Inc., Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp. and Sony Ericsson, all of which pay royalties to Kodak."
Apple is a shit of a company. using others technology without paying (not just kodak but nokia too). if there were more companies like this less R&D would be done and we be further back in technological progress. not only this but apple SUCKS HARD at collaboration and is extremely secretive. Fuck apple.
How about Apple use some of that pocket change they have laying around and do a little hostile takeover of Kodak. Then Steve Jobs can use their ancient camaras as target practice with his iSlate gesture controlled laser mounted sharks?
Obvious patent is obviously invalid.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Okay, the article has almost no information. All we know is that Kodak has asked that the offending devices not be shipped into the US. The other piece of information that we have is the stock prices of the three companies. WHY do these "reporter" insist on putting in a snapshot of the stock price at that moment in time? It has absolutely no value whatsoever yet they insist on putting it in. Totally meaningless and was one of the only factual items in the article. I hope I never understand business types....
Is there a patent for breathing, something like "A way to create a vacuum inside the human body in order to force external air inside the lungs, so oxygen can be transferred to the blood."
I'd love to patent it, then charge something like 0,0001$ per breathe per individual. At 12 breathes per minute * 6 billion humans, it's something like 36 000$ per hour.
What's great is that it would cost every human ONLY 52.56$ per year. Pretty reasonnable!
about dumb, obvious stuff. Let's talk about it.
In the meantime, Apple and RIM will probably just pay Kodak for the right to use the silly patents which shouldn't exist in the first place.
I'm guessing this is the part right before Kodak goes belly up.
mmmm...forbidden donut
My knee jerk reaction to this (no patent is given directly in TFA) is this: How is the act of previewing a photo novel? I could see that having a *specific technology* that enables this patented, but not the act of allowing the user to preview the photo. Plus, it's something that everyone since the personal camera came out wanted. I remember when you had to wait to develop a whole roll of film and hope that the exposure/lighting was correct while thinking to yourself, "Man, I wish i could see the photo i just took without taking it to the store and getting it developed."
Prior art on the analog side? Polaroid allowed 'photo preview' with their cameras before it was available in a digital format
Yeah, poor old innocent apple would never use stupid lawsuits against their competitors!
At least one of the patents is 6292218.
Claim 1 is a nice example of patenting the goal.
As other posters have already pointed out, we don't have much detail at this time. But let us assume for a moment that the Kodak patent in question is over the ability to preview a picture taken....
We have had thumbnail representations of pictures for much longer than 20 years.
And given a digital camera, the first thing you might want, after you take a picture, is to see what the picture looks like.
If this isn't obvious, what is?
And exactly how does it advance the technology to have every company pay a "tax" to Kodak who makes a camera with preview ?
Toss obvious patents! Cut the lifetime of the rest to 5 years!
If we really wanted free markets, competition, and growth of technology, the goal would be to cut the number of patents filed in the U.S. by 75 percent! Big companies use patents to tax others, and to crowd out competition. Do we really think Kodak had to come around and invent preview for digital cameras? Hogwash.
.....is not because the service provider wants to "encourage" you to sign up for a two year contract, it's because of all the stacked tech licensing fees.
Don't they know that Apple is above the law. sheesh
Kodak, makers of the Apple QuickTake 100 and 150 are suing Apple...good thing the QuickTake didn't have a preview mode! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake
[UID-HeinzIntel]
An out of court settlement with both companies.
The first thing I see amongst comments here is a bunch of stuff about invalid patents.
What the /. community needs to understand, is that not *every* patent is invalid just because its being used to sue.
Kodak is not a patent troll. They do real work, good work, and file patents on it to protect their inventions.
If there was ever a patent to assume is valid and in good standing, it would be a digital imaging patent, filed by a company that specializes in Imaging (and these days, Digital imaging).
Kodak is not evil. If these companies think they can implement functionality in their devices just because everyone else does, they need to think again. Everyone else is licensing the technology. If they are not, then they are infringing, and deserve to be sued.
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
Well I'll be! I was researching some facts to karma slut (I'm an AC so karma doesn't matter) and I found that the market cap of Kodak is 1.36 Billion! and Apple has over 5 billion in cash.
I didn't realize that Kodak was sucking wind so much. They used to be such a power house.
Looking at Kodak, it just might be a decent hostile takeover target - look at its cash balance Over 2 billion!
You mean Apples multi-touch patent?
Lets see, multi touch was used before that on touchpads.
Capactitive touchscreens existed prior to the patent.
But for some reason Apple get a patent to use multi touch on a touchscreen, thereby forcing other vendors to filter and ignore data delivered by the touch screen.
Not enforcable in Europe, beeing a pure software patent and i cant see how such a patent can be granted since its it actually places restrictions on the interpretation of data provided by a hardware device.
Because looking at what you're taking a picture of is completely non-obvious.
Presumably everyone with at least one working eye will be sued next.
It smells like MONEY !! Go Get Em Kodak !!
is how long the iPhone and such have been on the market already. If someone markets a product in violation of your patent, especially when it is so popular as the iPhone, then you best ship up pretty quick and get it cleared up instead of waiting a couple years to make a fuss. That just shows that you finally realized you could make a quick buck and not that you just realized the patent was being violated.
-1 Fanboi can not has truth
i guess
is how long the iPhone and such have been on the market already. If someone markets a product in violation of your patent, especially when it is so popular as the iPhone, then you best ship up pretty quick and get it cleared up instead of waiting a couple years to make a fuss. That just shows that you finally realized you could make a quick buck and not that you just realized the patent was being violated.
Or perhaps, Kodak has been trying to reach an agreement with Apple without going to court since the iPhone was released and now filed suit after deciding that Apple was unwilling to license the technology. I don't know either way, but we don't have enough information to decide.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The story omits the rather important detail of the patent number. Without it (and a link wouldn't hurt) it's rather hard to tell how much merit there is. On a broader scale, it goes to show how messed up the patent system is. The scales lean so far toward "pointless patent trolls" that it's virtually assumed anyone suing over a patent is wrong. Kodak do hold several well-earned patents (though not photostatic copies - nya nya nya) and it's not a bad idea to get people paid for coming up with good ideas. Then again, you can't expect to get paid forever or for something that is blatantly obvious given the tech at hand at time of "discovery". The balance is horrible right now.
... Or more likely they've been talking with Apple and RIM for a while now, and the negotiations broke down.
Does this mean it will now be harder to get a RIM job?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And you might not think that Kodak has been talking to Apple about licensing? That is after all cheaper than court action, so they might give that a fairly long attempt. No no, instead they cunningly wait until products are hit and then take them to court as very first action... Funny how we didn't hear about Nokia, Sony-Ericssn etc getting sued
-- This post may contain traces of sarcasm.
He never said Apple was or should be "exempt". He suggested it might be a better deal for Apple to buy the whole company and reap the associated profits. You are so busy being anti-pro-Apple accusing someone of being pro-Apple, you didn't stop to read what was wrote and think about it apparently. That's OK. Judging by your 7 digit SlashID, you're young. You'll learn ...
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Kodak press release containing the patent number - 6,292,218 - and also stating that Kodak has won a ruling that the patent is valid and relevant in a similar case against Samsung.
Why don't they just make it save the image to the HDD/Flash Mem displaying it from there, and say "We're not previewing an image after we took it, we're displaying an image from our devices storage to the screen." Then they can just claim that the camera only stores images without preview and use the phone's OS to preview stored images.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Now that pretty much every digicam has an LCD it makes perfect sense to us that you'd put one there. But this patent could easily have been 'Virtual headset to preview photos' or 'Electronic Viewfinder' or something like that. Back when the Apple QuickTake was around (judging by the comments half of the commenters most of you wouldn't remember such old times) it was exciting that you could see the pictures on your COMPUTER screen, you didn't think much about seeing them *on the camera*.
The polariod wasn't a 'preview' either - it was actually a printed photograph with resource cost each time. People who say that was innovative should surely recognise the innovation in putting a display on the camera for a live preview!
It's something that seems trivial now, but it's certainly a lot more valid than a lot of patents out there.
This was mentioned in another article I read earlier today on Gizmodo. They also mentioned that Kodak has successfully sued Sun over Java implementing some of the same patent technology. Also, many other phone and camera manufacturers are already paying a licensing to Kodak for the patent. Apple and RIM just could come to agreements with Kodak over it and it is now going to court.
The day when patents were used to promote innovation.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Which is the bloody definition of preview.
Huh?
No, the preview takes other things into account besides just the framing of the picture - like the focus (which non-SLR viewfinders generally wouldn't), the lighting and exposure (flash notwithstanding), the color corrections (daylight/incandescent/fluorescent) and so on.
Bow-ties are cool.
Yes, the patent should obviously be overturned, but ...
Apple revealed they plan upon suing everyone for infringing upon their equally obvious multi-touch patents. Also, Apple always acts like other people's patents are irrelevant while their own matter. So please do make Apple sweat a little first.
I'll be happiest if Apple's own successful arguments here are eventually used to help overturn their own silly patents. :)
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I don't understand the aversion to software patents. Seems like, since software is even easier to copy, it is more deserving of protection.
I should clarify - I do understand the aversion, it comes from the whole "I want other people's work to be free" ethic that permeates this and other communities. I don't get why it's a valid principle may be what I should have said.
I disagree with the principle that being first to lay claim to an idea is justification for receiving exclusive use of that idea, and in practice a lot of these software patents seem like nothing more than subtle permutations of simple ideas, arranged in a series of legal tripwires to shut out anyone without a well-funded legal department and act as leverage against anyone else who does have a well-funded legal department.
And then in this case - a patent on being able to see how a picture will look before you take the shot... This is a feature that would have been pretty revolutionary in the days of film cameras. I can see how it would have taken a fair bit of foresight to come up with this idea at some point in the past. And if it were implemented on You would have to think about where the technology was going to go in the future. But when you make a camera based on an electronic sensor, this feature is pretty obvious. Read the output of the sensor and send it to a screen - it's not a complicated idea when you get to the point where the feature is actually practical. I don't think it's fair to act as though nobody else could have figured out how to do this had Kodak not documented and patented the idea beforehand.
Of course, I haven't read the patent (I can't find reference to what patents are involved in this) so it could be that there's more to it than that. So I must allow for the possibility that I am wrong and this patent isn't trivial...
Bow-ties are cool.
"Company alleges technology used in BlackBerrys, iPhones, infringe on a Kodak patent covering technology for previewing photos".
It does not appear to be the fact that they have a preview, it's the technology behind how they do the preview seems to be in question.
Is it possible that the manufacturer of the camera used in the iPhone pays royalties to Kodak already? Wouldn't that indemnify them? Or is Kodak allowed to collect royalties all along the chain?
I need to make a point more clearly than I did in my, er...., rant (I admit it) ... above.
The coward asserted: "What the patent system is meant to do is allow companies/individuals to recoup research and development cost."
To which I pointed to the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
The point I wish to make clear is that the U.S. Government has no constitutional motivation in seeking to insure that any company "recoups" anything.
Let's make that clear. EVEN if striking patents led to the damage of numerous companies, this is no justification for patents.
If an inventor or company fails to make money off their inventions, they will join a pantheon of historical figures and companies suffered that the same fate in the past.
No, what is important is the efficiency and the productivity of our companies, and the advancement of knowledge and progress. Most of us believe that it is only competition that drives progress. This is supposed to be why communism failed (no competition) and capitalism (competition) succeeded.
So why do we need to limit competition again? Because we need patents to compete with other such government defined and constricted systems like communism? Nobody would be willing to build a company unless the government set up a little space for it to thrive without anyone else competing with it?
I am just trying to understand the logic here....
Haha, iPhone seems to be a StealPhone ... Copied everything others had done, added own (?) UI and started billing ...
Why do we tolerate so many opinions from those who nothing about patent law and even less about the specific patents involved?
Just another example of the fact the less you know about something the more you have a strong opinion.
RIM or Apple should BUY out Eastman Kodak; license all photo technology to themselves for nominal consideration; fire all underperforming execs; clean up the company; and spin-off as "new" Eastman Kodak, except leaner and meaner and make a profit off the IPO!
You know how many breaths people take every year? Hundreds. Literally hundreds.
There is no way to compare the phone income vs. the computer and music income. Get your facts straight too.
Knowing abit about camera's i know that what you see on the LCD isn't exactly what you would get from just piping out the output of the sensor to the screen, there is alot of proccessing involved to give you that 'live view' picture on the screen.
Two Things that need to be compensated for (at a minimum):
- Shutterspeed: While using live-view light constantly floods the sensor, however, when you take the actual picture, the sensor will only receive light for the set speed, this can be anything between for instance 1/4000 of a second to 30 seconds or more, you need to process the live-view 'feed' from the sensor to show you how the actual picture would look
- ISO sensitivity: Your sensor can operate on multiple sensitivity settings, depending on the setting the sensor will be more or less sensitive to light
The above had to be done in real time, digital camera's 10 years ago didn't have the horse power to do that in software alone, nor do they have that kind of horse power now, that's why you have hardware assisted designs & chips, like for instance the EXPEED chip
6th paragraph:
“We've had discussions for years with both companies in an attempt to resolve this issue amicably, and we have not been able to reach a satisfactory agreement,”
People should really read the article...
This brings up a point that I have wondered about. The "shutterspeed" on a digital camera.
I always assumed that this was just another word for "how much motion blur do you want?" or "how many sensor refreshes do you want to average together?" and not that the sensor actually has a shutter preventing light from hitting the sensor at any time. So at that point there isn't any difference between the "live-view light costantly flood[ing] the sensor" and when the actual picture is taken.
Same for the "iso speed". It seems like a very artificial analogy back to film for what is really a software brightness setting. In fact, given that both of these probably change multiple things to achieve the effect of shutterspeed or film-speed, I wonder if it might be easier to control and more accurate if the cameras presented the real digital variables to be changed (or something more representative of what is actually happening in the digital camera.)
However, I admit that I don't know if any of this is true. It is a speculation and a request for clairification from anybody out there who is actually programming/designing digital cameras.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
That's not true. Look at a video that shows camera work on any TV show made in the 50s or 60s. You can see that the cameras being used have monitors on board that give them a preview of the output of the camera, which is what allows them to set up, prior to being committed to recording by the control room. Electronic preview of image(s) prior to recording. It's obvious. It's so obvious they had it figured out half a century ago. As to which button does it, or if it is digital in nature somewhere along the path... feh. Still bloody obvious.
For that matter, ham radio SSTV units (ie ROBOT 400 by ROBOT inc.) have had digital camera preview displays since (at least) 1976. You could preview on the monitor, you could shoot into ram and not commit, etc. Again, as soon as you have a camera that makes recordings of any type, the idea of "preview" is so bloody obvious it's almost painful.
These patents are ludicrous.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes, but when was the actual lawsuit filed? Not only that, many people are saying "well the preview has been around... look at the view finder..." etc. I have an older digital camera, not extremely old, just a few years (maybe from 2003?). It's a FujiFilm, and after taking a picture, you'd have to switch over to "play" mode to view the picture you just took. I believe this patent would have to do with taking the photo, and then the phone showing you what was actually captured, after processing and all that... such as on the BB Storm where after you take a picture it shows the actual captured image in all it's glory (blurry, flash washed it out, etc) and asks if you'd like to save or delete.
Um, yeah. So, like previewing and reviewing images on a camera which uses a computerized display in place of a viewfinder isn't obvious to those skilled in the trade?
oooookay, then. This is a USPTO fail. Yet again.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Surely, surely, - it is time to reign-in patents. It is simply not being a "team-player" to try to own an idea, and hold other over a barrel over it! How did this get this bad?
When Kodak introduced an instant-print camera, Polaroid used a patent lawsuit to shut down the whole product line.
Kodak settled out of court for $925 million.
$925 million. Amount Kodak paid to Polaroid in out-of-court settlement for infringement on Polaroid's instant camera patent. "Eastman Kodak Co. paid $925 million to Polaroid Corp. yesterday as part of a surprise out-of-court settlement of their historic 15-year legal battle over Kodak's infringement of Polaroid's patents on instant camera technology. ...Kodak's payment, meanwhile, included $873 million, the amount of damages awarded Cambridge-based Polaroid by federal Judge A. David Mazzone in January. (That was a revision of his original $909.5 million judgment, issued last October.) The balance represents $52 million in interest. Both companies had appealed Mazzone's ruling, the largest patent-infringement award ever. Polaroid said it deserved $12 billion, Kodak argued that it owed Polaroid $177 million. The companies said in separate statements that they were relieved to end their long court fight, which began in April 1976 when Polaroid sued Kodak, charging that its new instant camera violated several Polaroid patents." Largest settlement in patent lawsuit. (Lawrence Edelman, Globe Staff, "Kodak pays Polaroid $925m Part of a surprise out-of-court settlement ends 15-year legal hassle," The Boston Globe, July 16, 1991) How much have courts awarded to inventors for patent infringement?
Apple has "redefined" less than 3% of current market (and with the uptake of mobile phones in developing countries, areas in which Apple is not interested in, that percentage might as well go down)
Absolutely. If Apple had "redefined" the market you'd expect the iPhone to have had an obvious influence on the design of every other smartphone released since the iPhone was announced.
Probably, large hardware manufacturers such as HTC would have written custom front ends to Windows Mobile to give it a more iPhone-like GUI. I expect some big concern like Google would have taken a leaf out of Apple's book and got into the smartphone market (maybe with a Linux-based platform). And everybody and their dog would have announced an "App Store" for their phone platform. Even cheap'n'cheerful phones and medial players would be styling their products along the lines of the iPhone.
But, as we know, none of that happened. The iPhone didn't have any significant effect on the mobile industry.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
That merely shows that Nokia's phone-based income most likely dwarfs Apple's phone-based income, which was exactly the point that was being debated.
It's official. Most of you are morons.