7 ms·
We Had No Idea (the first digital camera)
- zeteo 16y agoIt seems kind of pointless to take a patent on something even /you/ think will only become big in 15-20 years...
- sp332 16y agoThe small chance of licensing the patent later is all the incentive Kodak had for putting money into this project.
- zeteo 16y agoYou just seem better off keeping your research secret for 10-15 years, and /then/ taking the patent.
- sp332 16y agoThe point of the patent system is to encourage inventors to publish their inventions without fear of having the idea stolen.
- mcknz 16y agoOdd. I always thought it was litigation.
- brazzy 16y agoWell, you thought wrong. Patents were intended (and, for the longest time, worked quite well) as a trade between inventors and society: the inventor gets a legal 20 year monopoly on using his invention, and the rest of the world learns how exactly it works so that they can use it freely afterwards.
- mcknz 16y agosorry, forgot the sarcasm tags.
- zeteo 16y agoBut the whole idea of my comment was that patents expire in 20 years!
- mcknz 16y agoThen again you run the risk of someone else beating you to the patent. I love those stories about how the famous creator/inventor of [some idea or device] published the discovery an hour/day/week before someone else.
- ars 16y agoThat's correct, but you run the risk of someone else patenting the idea first. So it's risky - but could pay off if you invent something far ahead of its time.
- jerf 16y agoSince a patent lasts 17 years (give or take various exceptions), I think the point is that taking one out 17+ years in advance is sort of silly, specifically because of the time lag. I'd suggest that it's still worthwhile just to make sure that someone else doesn't file it; it's better to have something like this publicly available so nobody can sue you, even without the monopoly, rather than run the risk of getting it patented by someone else and then have to litigate the prior art.
- 10ren 16y agoBut if you have developed something truly ahead of the state-of-the-art, disclosing it gives your competitors a leg-up. Another problem with patenting it is that it gets more expensive to maintain each year (there are increasing annual fees), so by the end, the total expense would be enormous; hard to justify if there is zero revenue coming in. [I'm going by Australian law here, assuming US is the same] Hmmm..... I wonder if this means that many patents "on the books" have actually expired for this reason, before the full 17/20 years?
- JacobAldridge 16y agoGood rule of thumb for any tech development (including startups) - if you're working on an idea, someone else is also working on exactly that idea. Of course, that won't be true in many cases. The patent is there for the times that it is.
- zeteo 16y agoThat doesn't matter if the technology is very unlikely to be commercialized within the lifetime of a patent, does it? Even if the other party takes the time and expense to file the patent, you both still end up with zero.
- jrockway 16y agoA legal framework for invalidating other people's independent discoveries? Sounds like a great idea.
- JacobAldridge 16y ago"Ay, there's the rub" - Hamlet Act III Scene i
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- thumper 16y agoI wonder if these guys would have gotten funding in today's corporate world, showing off that clunky device! It seems like this is a good example of the kind of leap that management needs to be able to take to see the potential of research work. We've all been so habituated to expecting "the world of tomorrow, today" that now researchers have to get a lot closer to productization (especially with respect to aesthetics) for higher-ups to "get it".
- sprout 16y agoIt sounds like they didn't get funding in the corporate world of 1976. >Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore’s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919). That seems to be as far as Kodak took it until digital cameras really started to eat their lunch.
- rtyuioiujhygf 16y agoNot really, Kodak where at the forefront of large low noise CCDs in the early 90s. They had industrial chips that wiped the floor with a lot of the science CCD suppliers. The first pro digital cameras where from Kodak, or had a Kodak CCD inside.
- TomOfTTB 16y agoIn fairness I'm not sure they should have gotten funding. While this is amazing in retrospect it was completely inviable in 1976 (the year Apple was founded). The digital photo revolution that followed was reliant on Personal Computers, GUIs, cheap memory and a many other things that wouldn't appear for decades. The idea was just too far ahead of its time (though I suppose they could have been the most successful patent trolls of all time had they pursued it)
- brazzy 16y agoBy the time the technology became viable, the patent had expired, or was close to it. Of course, they could have tried to build a collection of auxillary patents around it later.
- vl 16y agoIt's an interesting achievement, but as far as I understand, all technologies demonstrated in this prototype were already used on satellites by this time.
- wmf 16y agoWas that satellite technology classified? IIRC the military also invented digital audio and public-key crypto but these inventions weren't publicly known until decades later by which time they had been reinvented by civilians.
- brc 16y agoFilm business - dead from Digital Cameras - time taken ~7 years from first affordable high quality cameras. Music Distribution business (cds/vinyls in shops) - death throes from Digital Music players - time taken ~7 years from first affordable high quality mp3 players. Newspaper business - first models of viable media devices (Kindle, iPad) now viable - gone by 2015?
- ams6110 16y agoWell I can still buy 35mm film, and vinyl records, and CDs and DVDs. So no print won't be gone in 2015, but it will likely be a shadow of its former self.
- mitjak 16y agoIsn't it already?
- Groxx 16y agoThat's pretty much the point. Film exists, but it's much more of a niche market now, instead of being the only market. And Polaroid and Kodachrome at least are wholly dead, barring imitators. Print won't die, just like stone carving and thatching. There will always be some market. Might it lose the dominant market status though? To some degree (ease, storage, etc), I hope so. To others, (book trades, notes, no cord) I hope not. We'll see.
- brc 16y ago'Dead' means 'dead as a way of making bulk money'. There will always be specialist businesses dealing with old technology.
- mootothemax 16y agoPainting, sheet music and writing are unlikely to die a sudden death any time soon, as they're the only ways of achieving their aims with one's bare hands. Print media nicely bridges the gap, and whilst I'm sure that volumes are going to decrease, /why/ would it ever disappear?
- Robin_Message 16y ago
- vaksel 16y agoif you look at many inventions we use today...they were actually invented decades before they started getting used by consumers.