RED Files Lawsuit Against Nikon

Im no expert but the patent should not have been granted - raw photo stream to create video is as obvious as a round wheel or a sharp blade which cannot (afaik) be patented.

Im convinced that in 2007 odd Jannard and me both owned nikon D3 cameras and had the same thought..

"if this shot 24 or more fps instead of 8 i could use this instead of a trashy codec video camera to make films. Id get proper file flexibility and DOF."

this was obvious and therefore not patentable.. in my opinion.

also not a unique invention as I had the thought too as did doubtless a thousand others.

timelapse films were also utilising raw stills stream - just not hitting 24 fps aquisition at that time.
 
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The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has invalidated more than 2,000 patents since it began work in just a decade ago. Apple alone has successfully attacked as many as 200 patents. Yet, in spite of the Board's eagerness to overturn patents for rich and powerful corporations like Alphabet and Apple, and regardless of Apple's $76 billion dollar war chest and army of 500 lawyers (Apple earns 151 billion dollars EACH day), they failed to have the patents held by a relatively tiny American company with earnings of just a few hundred million dollars/year thrown out, the Board saying that Apple had failed to prove that RED's patents were obvious. In fact, at the time brilliant Graeme Nattress came up with the idea for REDCode RAW, not a single other manufacturer even entertained the idea. Even the notion of using an image sensor with a bayer-pattern filter for a cinema camera was novel at the time! So no, it wasn't obvious, except to all the armchair pundits on the Internet.
 
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If you owned nikin d1 2 or 3 wanting that camera at 24 fps was obvious

knowing that the files were better than 35mps xdcam mush was obvious

knowing that the sensor size matched 35mm film and would use the same lenses and create the same dof was obvious

knowing that 'film' is made from a series of still seperate frames is obvious

building a device that could capture raw at 24fps was a simple brief that needed JJ money, not any unique imagination

I think at the time the D cameras were already doing 12 fps burst and any owner 'filmed' stuff for a laugh.
 
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intra frame (?) or long gop seem to have IP and not be obvious to anyone versed in the basic method (many frames projected fast) of making a movie.
 
jonpais said:
In fact, at the time brilliant Graeme Nattress came up with the idea for REDCode RAW, not a single other manufacturer even entertained the idea. Even the notion of using an image sensor with a bayer-pattern filter for a cinema camera was novel at the time! So no, it wasn't obvious, except to all the armchair pundits on the Internet.
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I think it was obvious. But that doesn't mean that everyone shared the same idea, or vision, of when it would be commercially lucrative to implement it. High resolution, raw capture has always been a balancing act, while juggling resources. RED has made a business model of being a half to one step ahead of what others have thought made sense at the time.

They have both successes and failures due to this.

The second I took off with my first DJI drone back then, let it rise and let go of the controls... and just let it hover there, in a pretty strong wind, followed but flying away from me quite a bit only to let it return back home autonomously, it was clear: this is the future of human transportation.
Private citizens will take off and transport themselves through the air in the future. It won't be necessary to get a pilot's license... perhaps not even a license at all, since you won't be flying—just riding.
Maybe the business model will be the same as e-scooters today, that you see littered around everyone. Go to the nearest drone hub and find a free one. Pick one of the available pre-programmed routes and off you go.

Just as obvious as it is to extrapolate today's mini drones to something bigger, doesn't mean that everyone is busy building the next get of human transportation. There are many hurdles in the way: both technical, judicial and mental.

I'm no expert, but my feeling is that the current patent system is pretty ineffective. It gets things done, but it's also used and abused. It's not always fair, but then again... according to whom?
 
AndreeOnline said:
The second I took off with my first DJI drone back then, let it rise and let go of the controls... and just let it hover there, in a pretty strong wind, followed but flying away from me quite a bit only to let it return back home autonomously, it was clear: this is the future of human transportation.
Private citizens will take off and transport themselves through the air in the future. It won't be necessary to get a pilot's license... perhaps not even a license at all, since you won't be flying—just riding.
Maybe the business model will be the same as e-scooters today, that you see littered around everyone. Go to the nearest drone hub and find a free one. Pick one of the available pre-programmed routes and off you go.

Just as obvious as it is to extrapolate today's mini drones to something bigger, doesn't mean that everyone is busy building the next get of human transportation. There are many hurdles in the way: both technical, judicial and mental.
Click to expand...

I have questions about this conclusion. And generally, I think the idea that we're "still waiting for flying cars" is wrong. They're called helicopters and we've had them for decades. Yes, the automation of drones takes away the difficulty of flying them. But what about the safety aspect? And what about the tremendous energy required to get heavier payloads airborne? I admit that both those issues will probably be overcome. But not soon, and there will still be reasons to use ground transportation
 
Now that is interesting. I wonder what their strategy will be. Seeing that Sony gave up on trying to encode RAW onboard after their patent fight with the RED boys?

Chris Young
 
ahalpert said:
But not soon, and there will still be reasons to use ground transportation
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My intention was not to imply a timeline, but rather to say that it's very easy to see—after having experienced how autonomous and capable drones are—that it will be the preferred way to travel.

Densely populated areas are famous for their congested traffic. There's simply no more room left in many cases. Taking to the skies would free that up quite a bit. It will start with deliveries. When people are used to drones flying around finding exact addresses and not falling down all the time, the mental block will lift. Technical and legal work will happen in parallell.

I just meant that I don't expect early adopters, like the Jetson ONE copter, to be able to secure a patent for "transporting people in an autonomous aerial vehicle", for the foreseeable future.
 
I think RED's claim that "Nikon and RED are direct competitors in the video camera market" is a great stretch, as RED specifically makes video cameras for generally cinema use, and Nikon makes photo cameras which now have some video features, not to mention that their products are in very different market tiers, but I also don't see the relevance of the claim.

Does Nikon have to be a direct competitor in order for it to be an infringement?

Also, didn't Nikon license the TicoRAW format from intoPIX? Why isn't intoPIX named in the suite?

I hope that the infringement claims are baseless and that Nikon can go along their merry way.
 
cyvideo said:
Now that is interesting. I wonder what their strategy will be...

Chris Young
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Nikon will probably state the infoPix JPEG2000 codecs were sufficiently preparatory for compressed Raw and that Red, however inventive, had nothing to do with JPEG2000 and its natural developments. Whether Sony and Apple can share the same history is up to the codec historians. And their lawyers.
 
AndreeOnline said:
My intention was not to imply a timeline, but rather to say that it's very easy to see—after having experienced how autonomous and capable drones are—that it will be the preferred way to travel.
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Yeah, I can't deny that I'd love to stroll down to the local drone pad and hop a flight across town. And I think I can broadly support your original analogy
 
Imamacuser said:
I think RED's claim that "Nikon and RED are direct competitors in the video camera market" is a great stretch, as RED specifically makes video cameras for generally cinema use, and Nikon makes photo cameras which now have some video features, not to mention that their products are in very different market tiers, but I also don't see the relevance of the claim.

Does Nikon have to be a direct competitor in order for it to be an infringement?

Also, didn't Nikon license the TicoRAW format from intoPIX? Why isn't intoPIX named in the suite?

I hope that the infringement claims are baseless and that Nikon can go along their merry way.
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For the purposes of determining infringement, it doesn't really matter whether Nikon is a direct competitor to RED. Infringement occurs if an entity "makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention" (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/271).

I believe part of the reason that RED makes the claim that Nikon is a direct competitor is to try and demonstrate that Nikon would have had knowledge of RED's patents before introducing the Z9. Since both companies make cameras that can record video and since RED has had several lawsuits against other camera manufacturers (Sony, Kinefinity, etc.), RED's claim is that Nikon likely would have already known about their patents.

The reason this matters is that there are several different types of patent infringement (https://www.upcounsel.com/types-of-patent-infringement) and demonstrating prior knowledge of the patent is important for several of them. Prior knowledge is important for indirect infringement, which is often relevant for method patent claims (of which RED has several). And prior knowledge is also important for proving willful patent infringement, in which case any damages that would be awarded are tripled.

With regard to TicoRAW and intoPIX, TicoRAW is just a codec for encoding RAW video, but most of RED's patents center around a video camera that can record compressed RAW video. So generally speaking, RAW video codecs alone do not necessarily infringe on RED's patents, and there are several compressed RAW codecs out there already, including ProRes RAW, CinemaDNG, and now TicoRAW. But once a compressed RAW codec is incorporated into a camera, then it risks infringing on RED's patents.

RED's patents are actually fairly broad in this area, for example, claim 11 of patent 8,174,560 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8174560B2/en) says the following:
11. A video camera comprising:

a lens assembly supported by the housing and configured to focus light;

a light sensitive device configured to convert the focused light into a signal of raw image data representing the focused light and having a resolution of at least 2 k;

a memory device; and

means for compressing and recording the raw image data in the memory device at a frame rate of at least about 23 frames per second such that the image data remains substantially visually lossless upon decompression.​

So, essentially that covers any camera that can record compressed RAW video of 2K resolution @ 23 fps or higher.
 
Nothing makes me never want to own RED more than crap like this.

Instead of the EU attacking Apple for its lightning port I would rather see them actually tackle something that is anti competitive
 
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