NewsShooter : Apple challenges RED over RAW patent legitimacy

Teodor Miljevic said:
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.
Click to expand...

I fear this might prove to be the truth and not a 'joke' at all! After the 'Red MiniMag' fiasco and the invalid patent sham, I'd be surprised if RED really developed their own sensors and processors from scratch. Indeed, a half baked copy of an existing product would make sense for the Comodo RED, considering it was originally going to be 'outsourced' to a chinese manufacturer (verbatim from one of the 'teasers') and that it was originally going to be 'just' an accessory for the Hydrogen phone.

Irrespectively, the Komodo would have to have some ground breaking performance vis-a-vis the competition to sell for more then twice the Blackmagic 6k, which does include a monitor and a full editing and colouring software suite in the price!
 
Grug said:
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.
Click to expand...
combatentropy said:
For something to be patentworthy it should be (a) new and (b) not obvious.
Click to expand...

I see two problems with the current patent simple: lots of obvious ideas are allowed to be patented, and patents last too long... or too little. With the current system, all patents last 20 years. For software, I would make patents expire after two years, at most. For algorithms (e.g. stuff for self-driving cars) and electronics (processors, phones, cameras, etc), maybe four years, and I'm being very generous here. But then again for things like cancer drugs they need to last a lot longer: in recent decades, every cancer drug researched privately has tackled final-stage cancer patients, because drugs for the initial stages, altough much more beneficial for humanity, wouldn't be profitable, the clinical trial for them takes decades to complete and the patent is worthles by the time you've proven the drug is effective and side-effects are under control (for last-stage drugs, in three years you know if the patient has died or survived and you have plenty of time to get back your research investment).
 
Compressing raw files could be turned into an essential technology which limits fees that can be charged (or supposed to limit them), at worst this is what I see happening here and it could be pennies per unit to license this essential technology. Apple hs deep pockets and legal teams that do nothing but fight for them.

If it is really based on jpeg compression, then it could be deemed as prior work and could get throw out. Even just a wavelet compression of video files which had been done long before. You would have to argue that raw files are not video files. And if they are not video files, then they must be the same as raw stills files, which could then be prior art and depending on how it is done, could have to pay Canon, Nikon, or some other camera maker for their flavor of raw file.
 
The main claim is that the provisional patent did not include full disclosure of whatever they were claiming, and so when they filed the full patent it was an invalid patent due to it being more than one year since public disclosure. That makes all arguments about obviousness moot since there is no valid patent. The court will consider this claim before even addressing other reasons that the patent may be invalid.
 
That thread over at Newsshooter is going nuts, almost a brawl between posters. Very entertaining with a lot of trolling and ad hominem attacks.
 
DLD said:
Erik is on a rampage now. Comment Deleted.
Click to expand...

It's Summer, I'm stuck in editing purgatory for the next couple of weeks. So taking a rendering break and watching RED Fan Boys and Naysayers rumble is cheap entertainment ;-)
 
Back in the day one of my corporates was a legal seminar, one major issue discussed was companies trying to patent anything and everything even if they had no idea of how to implement it, in the hope someone else would and they could the licence it. Another stunt was buying up defunct companies partly for the IP of anything the business may have been working on.
 
During your good times you can hoodwink some people or even all the people. However times change. Before turning professional filmmaker, I was involved in electronic manufacturing. So I know a thing or two about companies taking short cuts. The faithful won't like to believe that their favourite company can take a shortcut. However, one should remember that even in companies it is the people who make decisions. So it boils down to the ethics or lack of it of those decision makers.

Apple is known for its dogged fights against patents that it feels frivolous or infringing on its rights. It has way more fire power than RED can ever imagine. So this battle will be interesting.
 
Apple may sue to invalidate the patent, but it's not the only method. Other companies may choose to forge ahead confident that they would win if there was a fight. When the patent holder comes a-knocking, the response may be either "we don't feel your patent holds water" or a simple "screw you - try to sue me." And then the patent holder is left to decide if they want to try to fight it out in court. I've seen patents violated left & right and know that the patent holder decided for a variety of reasons not to try to enforce. This can be a case of the patent being questionable or is it really worth it given the cost of the fight. I know cases in which the patent holder was clearly right and other cases where it was the "violating" company. The choice of action was a business decision, not who was in the right.
 
indiawilds said:
During your good times you can hoodwink some people or even all the people. However times change. Before turning professional filmmaker, I was involved in electronic manufacturing. So I know a thing or two about companies taking short cuts. The faithful won't like to believe that their favourite company can take a shortcut. However, one should remember that even in companies it is the people who make decisions. So it boils down to the ethics or lack of it of those decision makers.

Apple is known for its dogged fights against patents that it feels frivolous or infringing on its rights. It has way more fire power than RED can ever imagine. So this battle will be interesting.
Click to expand...

That's what many find interesting. Apple could literally buy RED like you or I would buy a pack of gum, they have basically endless legal and financial resources. A lot of people are wondering what will happen in this crazy, rollercoaster year that RED has had so far.
 
puredrifting said:
That's what many find interesting. Apple could literally buy RED like you or I would buy a pack of gum, they have basically endless legal and financial resources. A lot of people are wondering what will happen in this crazy, rollercoaster year that RED has had so far.
Click to expand...

Apple has some quarter trillion laying around but Red belongs to an industry with rapidly shrinking sales and plummeting profits. Who, Carly Fiorina aside, invests into a company that could be worth nothing tomorrow? (the smartphone industry is in a similar conundrum, btw) Apple will be better served to buy a TV network or a Hollywood studio.
 
A few people are so upset about “big business Red”, when Sony, Panasonic, and Apple are so mich bigger.

Red, aside from a connection to a guy that used to own Oakley, is a small company.
 
puredrifting said:
That thread over at Newsshooter is going nuts, almost a brawl between posters. Very entertaining with a lot of trolling and ad hominem attacks.
Click to expand...

Of course. People envious of Red owners want to attack Red because they think that the fact that everyone wants one but no one else offers 8K somehow implies that Red is hindering the industry?

Besides, if there were any legitimacy to this bogus suit, Sony would have won when it sued Red...
 
James0b57 said:
... Red, aside from a connection to a guy that used to own Oakley, is a small company.
Click to expand...

As is ARRI Group - total revenues around $400M. Taking a look at a much bigger company in the same industry, Kodak's 2000 revenues were ~ $14B, with ~ $8B coming from the consumer imaging sector.

Edit :

To eyeball some ARRI numbers - let's say that $300M out of their ~ $400M come from their camera sales (the rest from lighting, lenses, etc) and that an average ARRI camera (Amira, Alexa and Alexa Mini) runs about $60,000. That would mean they move about 5,000 units annually.
 
Last edited:
Vultch said:
Back in the day one of my corporates was a legal seminar, one major issue discussed was companies trying to patent anything and everything even if they had no idea of how to implement it, in the hope someone else would and they could the licence it. Another stunt was buying up defunct companies partly for the IP of anything the business may have been working on.
Click to expand...

Yes. That's called "IBM."

IBM even made a business out of shaking companies down for patent infringement because its execs were too stupid to use its own patents for anything else.

For example, the world's first PDA wasn't Apple's... it was IBM's. Someone at TJ Watson developed one, the defectives at IBM stuffed it, and the prototypes sat on a shelf while Apple promoted the Newton flop. When Palm made a PDA actually work, IBM tried to resurrect its now antique PDA prototype, but was still too stupid to get anything right, and watched blankly while Palm swept its pitiful attempts away only to get squashed by Apple's 2nd attempt (which was a wee bit more successful than the Newton).

And where's IBM? Dying...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top