NewsShooter : Apple challenges RED over RAW patent legitimacy

This is one of those obvius patents That should have never been granted. It has hurt and slowed down the camerabusiness for ten years. They have to be kind of slow, dimwitted or have some very secret bankaccounts in Switzerland(joke) people in the us patentoffice. Reds compressed raw, litepanels ledpanel patent or half of apples stupid patents. (Square phone with one Homebutton) maybe they Will Grant me a patent for oblong glassobject made for drinks or the super hightech Idea of computerperhepial with one button for every letter in the alphabet.
I can not understand how two obvious things can be combined into something propriatery. They didnt invent raw and they certainly didnt invent jpeg2000. Even that more specific combo would be a stretch to patent in a non corporatebana republic but compressed raw internally recorded wow just wow.
I look forward to seeing Apple destroy them. Hopefully their triumph creates glassshards that cut them from the glasshouse they just started a stonefight in. The sooner we kill bullshit patents the quicker we can create more progress and innovation.
 
A story: Man becomes billionaire by buying cheap Chinese eyewear products and selling for super premium prices then takes that knowledge into the video camera world. In addition to selling cheap Chinese video products at extreme prices he also becomes a patent troll knowing his billions will stop most anyone from questioning his patents. He was wrong. Not the end of story.
 
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Every company that can afford it does exactly the same thing Red does. They patent anything they can. So if you applaud Apple for going after Red, then you need to find a hero that is suing Apple and every other corporation.

Don't blame companies for doing this. It's the patent office that allows this nonsense to go on. Companies are forced to do this to stay in the game. I worked for a company that had thousands of patents. I had a quota to file patents. I filed anything that seemed like it might go through. The sole purpose of having them was so that they could negotiate a settlement when they got sued. Behind the scenes of these lawsuits is the lawyers who sit at a table and say "Well, if you sue us for this we will sue you for that." Then they decide how much time and money they want to spend on all the suits going on at any one time.
 
Paul F said:
Every company that can afford it does exactly the same thing Red does. They patent anything they can. So if you applaud Apple for going after Red, then you need to find a hero that is suing Apple and every other corporation.

Don't blame companies for doing this. It's the patent office that allows this nonsense to go on. Companies are forced to do this to stay in the game. I worked for a company that had thousands of patents. I had a quota to file patents. I filed anything that seemed like it might go through. The sole purpose of having them was so that they could negotiate a settlement when they got sued. Behind the scenes of these lawsuits is the lawyers who sit at a table and say "Well, if you sue us for this we will sue you for that." Then they decide how much time and money they want to spend on all the suits going on at any one time.
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Yeah so. And I do blame the companies for this. Just a reminder: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/business/economy/patents-trolls-supreme-court.html

and the court outcome: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/business/scotus-patent-trolls.html


and Apples got a $600 per hour paid expert to fight Red : http://www.reader.com/ipr.html

From Cliff Readers website:

" I am writing a history of MPEG, tracing the development of each of the coding tools from its origins to the final form in the standard. Examples of major coding tools are the DCT, Motion Compensated Prediction and Variable Length Coding. Examples of minor coding tools are DC Prediction and Coded Block Pattern. The history is interesting because many techniques were developed early, before economical implementation existed, and were subsequently reinvented (probably in innocence) when serious attention was being paid to digital video. In other cases, techniques were developed for niche applications and published outside mainstream journals. "

This guy has been in the game far far longer than Red and knows what he's talking about.
 
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Just so we're clear no one is against patents here. Its the twisting and turning of a patent to such a ridiculous degree that it hurts consumers and innovation. A medical company trying to patent dosage amounts as reported in the nytimes article, in order to be extract a fee is ridiculous. And the courts agreed. Read the article not your muscle reflex.

Most every camera company now has their own raw codec, Canon Raw, Braw, Prores raw. But because no one needs RedCode Raw Reds not happy because they want their fee for a Red defined compression ratio patent which to me is ridiculous and it seems so does the Apple expert Cliff Reader.

In 2018 217 million iPhones were shipped worldwide. If apple wants to implement prores raw in their phones in the future with a certain compression ratio and have to pay a fee, and I don’t know what those contracts fees say, but it’s obviously a considerable amount of money so much so that apple is willing to fight that patent.
 
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The point of a patent is to allow innovators to profit from their inventions without undue copying. Once the patent expires, then the concept is fair game for everyone else to use. That’s where public domain benefits everyone.

Has Red’s patenting of compressed raw recording in digital cinema cameras stifled other companies abilities to implement the same concept? Absolutely. But that’s the entire reason for patents existing.

Red have successfully managed to protect their patent against challenges from big competitors on multiple occasions. And just because Apple is the biggest yet, that by no means guarantees they’ll succeed where others have repeatedly failed.

Red saw the future of motion imaging, and got there well in advance of everyone else. That gives them the advantage.

I think the speed of development in the digital age does make the 25 year lifespan of a regular patent something worthy of reassessing (for the sake of upholding the broader purpose of public domain). But that’s a separate issue.

It’ll be VERY interesting to see how this unfolds, and whether Apple can persevere were everyone else has failed.
 
Grug said:
The point of a patent is to allow innovators to profit from their inventions without undue copying [...] Has Red’s patenting of compressed raw recording in digital cinema cameras stifled other companies abilities to implement the same concept? Absolutely. But that’s the entire reason for patents existing.
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Are you saying that had Red not made Redcode, no one would have compressed RAW with wavelets?

The math behind wavelets dates back to 1910, with the Haar function and matrix.
There's quite a few papers about using it to compress various things in the 1990s.
JPEG2000 came out in 2000.
Cineform RAW came out in 2002, using wavelets to compress RAW.

For something to be patentworthy it should be (a) new and (b) not obvious.

Clearly it was not new. Is there something in Red's patent that differentiates it from its forebears, and if so, was it non-obvious?

And I think it should be obvious that by obvious they mean to other specialists in the field. Of course the wavelet compression of RAW images was not obvious to you or me, because we are not specialists in image compression. But for someone whose job is to work on image compression, I would not be surprised if several of them would "invent" it independently of each other.

It is not unlike how you, specializing in photography, might sound like some sort of genius were you to describe the concept of an F-stop to someone who knows nothing about photography. And furthermore to you it might not seem that clever to try to preserve highlights by underexposing by a stop or two, and then lightening the image in post. Is that patentworthy? Well, Ken Rockwell claimed it is.

A patent is not dibs. It is not meant to reward whoever applies first, if others in the field would have come up with the same idea on their own. Often they already have.
 
Next article. Jinnitech opens up Komodo finds its a plastic cage surrounding a z-cam s6 an and a black magic hdmi to sdi 6g converter. Jim and Jarred are furious: we have actually made a propriatery extra short hdmicable to fit inside the komodo kitcamera. (it took us three hours to solder that cable someone has to pay for the R&D) Red has also patended the unfair usage of made in america. So if you want to rebrand chinese made stuff and put them in a packaging you made yourself this is no longer legal. The process is called Redding and if you are interested beeing able to do this you can contact our layers to negotiate a fee, Said Camera magnate Jim Jannard before putting on his oakley branded soldering glasses to make another super short hdmi-cable. someone heard him mutter that he wished for the good old days when one could just go out in the forrest and milk some snakes for oil.

Sorry I couldnt help myself :) If anyone from the us patentoffice reads this it is a joke. If you dont know what a joke is it is when you use words to present a scenario so foreign to the reader that it makes them laugh. If you don't get the concept its a little bit like the work you are doing.
 
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Man someone updated reds wiki page:” After a failed lawsuit by RED against the maker of JinniMag, a third party copy of the RED Mini Mag, it was revealed that RED Digital Cinema Cameras have been lying to their customers and possibly obtained their patents by deceiving the USPTO.[33]”

“In May 2019, Apple Inc. filed a lawsuit against RED.COM, LLC over several patents relating to digital cinema cameras and sensor processing.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Digital_Cinema
 
. It is not meant to reward whoever applies first said:
Unfortunately it is close to this. However the patent can be questioned if what is described can be shown to be in the public domain before the application date. That includes the same patent in another country within the agreed grace time ( usually one year for application in other countries )
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