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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."
Obvious patent is obviously invalid.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yes. Apple has never raised the bar on anything and nothing progressive has ever come out of Cupertino. No wonder you posted AC.
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!
Do you really want Apple to own a patent on photo previewing, and a thousand others? I'm sure they'll be kind and let RIM and Samsung and HTC and Motorola use those technologies at a very reasonable cost. Be careful what you ask for.
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Sorry, but you have it wrong. Apple is always an innovator.
The iSlate is going to have shark-mounted lasers.
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.
God forbid that a company that helped pioneer photography for the last hundred or so years be paid for doing so. These are real patents designed to incentivise R&D and prevent competitors cashing in on another company's research. Judging by the number of companies paying them they're not without merit - why should Apple be exempt?
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
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 Apple is special, haven't you heard? Not only in this case of course, it applies always - for example regarding Nokia wireless patents.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Funny how Nokia waited until the iPhone was a raging success before doing anything about those patents, isn't it?
Regardless of the nature of the situation, some of these patent claims (from all sorts of sources, not just this one) are absurd - I think it peaked with the "one click shopping" patent.
The whole system is just abused.
If Apple and RIM are in violation of this patent they will no doubt pay up. The cost of challenging is more than simply ponying up the cash.
That's simply false, Nokia tried to negotiate with Apple for quite a while. Plus, in the scale of Nokia, iPhone is very far from "raging success"...
One that hath name thou can not otter
actually it sounds more like patent squatting. the idea of previewing a picture before taking it should not be patentable. The hardware/software to do so might, however, apple isnt using kodiak hardware.
They mean different things, for starters. Are you complaining that words exist outside your vocabulary? Really?
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
apple isnt using kodiak hardware.
Well, no, they were wiped out by the Drago-Kazov, so very little of their hardware exists anymore.
FGD 135
Strip away the detailed descriptions of the prior art and claim 1 covers having a button to take a photo while seeing a live preview. That's not a "real patent designed to incentivise R&D", that's patenting a feature.
You missed an important point - The Slashdot community leans so far towards believing all patents are useless that it's virtually assumed anyone suing over a patent is wrong. It's not about (rather rare) pointless patent trolls at all. It's the rabid reactions of idealists who want everything to be free.
Flamebait?? I crack a joke and get modded flamebait?? Ok, it wasn't a great joke but, wow... I didn't realize mounting sharks on lasers was such a touchy subject...
My aversion, in general, is that "software" patents are usually algorithm patents, and as such, are too general. They protect the idea of the feature instead of the implementation.
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.
Apple have redefined the mobile market and everybody wants to do a phone like the iPhone. They also don't need to own the market to be a success, just make a profit, which is a damn sight more than what Nokia is doing.
Jonathanjk.com
If he's seriously making a business suggestion then it's moronic because:
But that's irrelevant, because it was clear from the second sentence that he was suggesting that Kodak were out of date ("ancient cameras") and deserved punishment for making this accusation by Apple ("target practice"). None of that seems to justify being labeled Insightful. Apologies for my age, unfortunately ad-hominems aren't considered legitimate arguments nowadays gramps.
In 2008, Nokia had a net income of 5.77 billion dollars, Apple had a net income of 4.83 billion dollars. Their margins are lower then Apple's but they're a far bigger company. Get your facts straight before dismissing others.
WHY do these "reporter" insist on putting in a snapshot of the stock price at that moment in time?
Because there's a patent on reporting on business news -without- giving the stock price.
That's a bear faced lie!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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); that's a curious definition of "mobile market" you have there. Also, it seems Nokia wants to go in a bit different direction, as their N900 shows (which is of course directly based on their earlier tablets; which were launched before first news of iPhone)
On top of that, Nokia is the only hugely profitable phone manufacturers. Others are either out of the market, struggling for a long time, or mobile phones aren't their main business (RIM is debatable here - do they market primarily mobile phones or corporate service?)
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's not clear to me that this isn't patentable. Before the digital camera you had to look through the viewfinder - there was no other way. The obvious way to design a digital camera would be with the CCD array as a drop in replacement for the film. You'd frame your shot with the viewfinder just as you always did. The relevant question is whether it would be obvious to someone skilled in the art of camera design to stick a screen where there never was one before and pipe the CCD data to it. It's not the greatest leap in the world - but it was, at one point, novel and it might not have been obvious.
The problem we have is with the benefit of hindsight, every digital camera has a screen on it, so it's not easy for us to imagine it any other way. But a digital camera could work just as well as a film point and shoot and then you'd take your memory card to the photoshop for prints rather than scrolling through them on the display. So had the preview functionality never been invented, no one would have even thought of the camera phone.
If this was a non-obvious invention, the fact that we can't imagine a present without it, it means that this was an especially important invention that deserves protection.
Offtopic?? Laser mounted sharks are NEVER offtopic!
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
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....
If you go through the effort of reading the patent (pretty sure it is http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6292218/fulltext.html but it might be a similar, but slightly different, patent) you will find that the Kodak method is, indeed, novel. Previous technology (camcorders as well as the QV-11, which used CCD technology, not LCD technology) converted the signal to NTSC format before displaying it. It appears that Kodak's method "avoid(s) the necessity of generating an NTSC format signal in order to reduce the complexity of the required circuitry". That's about all I have to say about this...
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
"actually it sounds more like patent squatting. the idea of previewing a picture before taking it should not be patentable"
EXACTLY. It is an idea anybody familiar with an SLR camera would know about.
The hardware, controlling software, and exact design specification should be patentable. The idea itself, should not.
And that's one thing that fucked our patent system. That goddamned commercial on TV "Have an idea? Patent it!" No. It should be "Have a unique invention/device? Patent it!" Ideas should not be patentable, as anybody with enough experience in the field should be able to come up with the same idea.
Machine or Transformation, not thoughts.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Apple have redefined the mobile market
Okay I'll bite - which definition of "redefined the market" are we using today?
and everybody wants to do a phone like the iPhone.
Really. So what features make a phone "like the iPhone" exactly?
They also don't need to own the market to be a success
The claim was that Nokia waited until the Iphone was a "raging success". So we have the classic Apple fan trick of redefining "success" in the market to mean something far weaker. I've seen this a million times before.
And does this mean that Apple weren't making a profit when the Iphone was first released? I mean, according to you, "raging success" just means making a profit, yet according to the OP, Nokia waited until they were a "raging success" (making a profit) before suing them. So which is it?
Apple is a "raging success" or "far more impressive", simply because they've been doing it for less? That makes no sense. We judge companies by their absolute success, and they don't get excuses simply because they've been doing it for less. But anyhow, I'm glad you agree that Apple are nowhere near as good as Nokia - as you say, they haven't been in it look, so what can we expect.
It's not like Apple are some teeny start-up - they've got billions of dollars at their disposal, and a trademark/brand that plenty of fans and media will give hype and free advertising to. On top of that, the phone industry is fast moving, and crosses over a large amount with computer technology, so playing catchup is easy (although it still took ages with Apple - 3G, and all the other features that were bog standard on phones for years before, yet for some reason it's the Iphone which is classed as a smartphone...)
If you actually look at everything in scale, the iPhone is far more impressive than just about anything Nokia has ever released in terms of sales numbers.
No, even in a given period of time, Nokia's sales are far greater, about an order of magnitude in fact. But let me guess, you've redefined "sales numbers" to mean something other than what it usually means.
Its rather retarded to compare a 4 year old product line to a 40 year old product line and use the word 'scale' so loosely.
Right, so if you concede that the 40 year old product line must be much better, why do we hear nothing about the Iphone?
These people aren't saying "Well the Iphone is nowhere near as good as Nokia, but hey, it's not bad considering it's only Apple"! They're claiming that the Iphone is the best ever. Claiming that by "best" you mean "not the best, but they would be if they'd been doing it as long, honest" makes no sense.
Apple's market cap is more than three times the size of Nokia's, and Apple could buy a controlling interest in Nokia using their liquid assets alone.
Pot. Kettle. Black. Bitch.
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.
Retarded would be looking at 4 decades of mobile telephony history, of which Nokia is major part, as a 40 year old product line and disregarding that Apple entered only at convenient moment for them; and mainly into a small segment of total market, made ready for Apple by castration of phones and lax concept of "affordable". But it's very interesting how you perceive long standing dedication of Nokia to provide communication equipment to people as somehow lessening their success...
(how is domination started with Apple II going along? What, Apple pissed away their advantage, their early start?)
Ah, and there's another fantasy with sales numbers. All the while only one model from Nokia, 1100, sold more, during its much shorter presence on the market, than all iPods combined. It is the most popular single consumer electronics device in history. BTW, Nokia is by far the biggest manufacturer of portable audio players in the world (shipping more units annually than Apple has ever produced). Probably even flashlights, too... (since a portion of their most popular phones include a LED one)
While Apple sold 30 million phones in those 4 years (and they don't seem to really want selling orders of magnitude more, perhaps preferring a world in which communication is a luxury), Nokia sold a billion in the last 2 years + one quarter. It is greatly responsible, among others, for the fact that while a year ago there were 3 billion mobile subscribers, now there are around 4.6 billion. You're a slime not thinking about the future of humanity if you think that's not monumental, far above anything Apple has done lately (they did similar things at the beginning, popularizing the concept of personal computer; and even then their scale was nowhere nearby what Nokia is doing)
PS. I also value that Nokia maintains R&D centers throughout the world and that most of their manufacturing plants are NOT in China.
One that hath name thou can not otter
But Apple sells pixie dust and dreams.
Nokia has only a small segment of the dream market and has not even *considered* entering the market for pixie dust.
Who's the winner now?
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.
Odd, this...
Apple is a computer maker that has had the ability to display digital images on an attached display for over 25 years.
I wonder when this patent was issued - after all, how long has Kodak been displaying digital images on an attached display?