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Apple's petition against RED
- IloveHN84 7y agoFunny how a patent warmonger company like Apple tries to fight against others' patents, when they are on the bad side. All these patents are now backing off too much the evolution
- croh 7y agowarmonger is indeed good word for apple.
- threeseed 7y agoApple is a patent warmonger company ? If that was remotely true they would be filing lawsuits all over the place. In fact the only time I can recall them suing anyone was Samsung who is hardly an innocent party.
- Monroe13 7y agoApple has filed more inter partes review petitions than any other company since the process came available a few years back. IPRs are very expensive for a patent owner to defend (low- to mid-six figures) so from the patent owner perspective Apple definitely fits the description of warmonger. Of course, if you think these patents are junk that never should have issued, Apple is doing God’s work.
- mlyle 7y agoSure but the original comment was > Funny how a patent warmonger company like Apple tries to fight against others' patents Implying that Apple is a particularly aggressive company when it comes to patent enforcement. Which I think most all of us can agree they're not Qualcomm or IBM.
- cromwellian 7y agoApple has sued for plenty of patents before including suing for “data detectors”, eg linkifying onscreen text or adding actions based on regexp or other pattern matching, some trivia and obvious to most engineers and with prior art in old email/news readers. They also had a habit of suing over trivial and obvious design patents. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars However they are no where close to some of the worst offenders.
- rapsey 7y agoYou are criticizing them for making use of a system they have no choice but to aggressively participate in or face destruction by someone who does. Patent right payments and lawsuits are in the billions.
- est31 7y ago> RED wanted to find a way to make digital compression visually lossless (i.e. no perceivable loss in quality). What does that mean? Is it lossless like lossless webp or png, or is it lossy and well performing under some metric like PSNR? "no perceivable loss in quality" can mean anything, including a lossy codec.
- ent 7y agoI'm pretty sure it does mean lossy codec. The > i.e. no /percievable/ loss in quality. would be pretty redundant otherwise.
- holy_city 7y agoHaving worked a bit in the field (on the audio side of film) "perceptually lossless" means that in a double blind study, an audience would not be able to discern between the lossless and the lossy encoded versions. The only way to verify is by testing with real people, and due to the nature of the business, it's easier to do it with professionals who have a higher bar for perception. There are a lot of reasons to prefer lossless over lossy, but there is always the "good enough" point with storage media. Film is not lossless, so it doesn't matter if the digital storage is. What matters is if the lossiness in encoding is good enough to work with at the same level as film.
- hvidgaard 7y agoThe industry also prefers to use people with "golden ears", so they can be pretty confident that the target audience cannot tell the difference.
- holy_city 7y agoThere's a weird bar for confidence, to be frank. Most often I've found that people disregard studies with people who have "golden ears" because they're not average ears, or that studies find that only those with "golden ears" can find a difference, and the audience tends to feel they're in that range. For example, there was a study a few years ago at McGill with trained listeners on the effects of bitrate with mp3 and m4a audio encoding that found that only a slim number of mastering engineers preferred lossless over lossy encoded audio (interestingly enough, some professional mixers and musicians found lossy encodings preferable to lossless even for jazz and classical music). But trying to convince audiophiles that those codecs are comparable to lossless is a losing battle.
- dogma1138 7y agoSo I’m guessing Apple wants to use the same technique in their new phones and couldn’t come to an agreement with RED?
- threeseed 7y agoCould be two reasons: 1) They just discovered this British inventor's work and thought it was worth petitioning in order to save a few dollars for Final Cut Pro. 2) They plan to allow the iPhone/iPad to output to ProRes RAW and don't want to pay the significant royalties and so have been actively looking for prior art.
- Monroe13 7y ago3) The IPR process is expensive to defend and has a high likelihood of cancelling at least some claims, so, like many patent battles is not about the patent at all but is about creating uncertainty and risk in order to alter the negotiating landscape.
- petedoyle 7y agoI believe the recently announced Afterburner card for the upcoming Mac Pro is an FPGA. [1] Maybe they're trying to make a reconfigurable accelerator? Would be amazing to be able to decode REDCODE RAW, ProRes RAW, etc, then turn around and reprogram the FPGA to accelerate encoding of H.264/H.265/AV-1/etc faster than a CPU could. Further, I think RED has a pretty close relationship with Nvidia [2]. For RED customers, it'd stink to buy a beefy Mac Pro and not be able to edit 8K REDCODE RAW as well as they could on other OSes that have better Nvidia support. Especially when you consider when the Mac Pro finally ships, it will probably be up against Zen 2 Threadripper (at least 32 cores, likely more), Nvidia GPUs, and PCIe 4.0 SSDs at a significantly lower price point. To not have solid REDCODE RAW support would be a huge miss for Apple. [1] https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/6408-apple-s-mac-pro-afterburner-what-just-happened https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/6408-apple-s-ma... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi79vUO0GMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi79vUO0GMk
- markdown 7y ago> Afterburner > Threadripper LOL are they marketing to children?
- acchow 7y ago> it'd stink to buy a beefy Mac Pro and not be able to edit 8K REDCODE RAW as well as they could on other OSes I don't think this lawsuit will have any bearing on REDCODE hardware decode on Mac OS. Especially since it would likely be RED who is responsible for that support.
- GuB-42 7y agoIANAL but if we allow software patents that should be valid. It may not take a genius to do what they did (Apple's point) but: - There are the first to do it. - They are using it commercially in their own products, they are not just trolls. - They didn't just patent an idea. They built a whole system around it. REDCODE is not just a compression algorithm. It is a compression algorithm optimized for a certain type of professional movie camera, one that they invented.
- icebraining 7y agoPatents (software or not) must non-obvious as well: "A patent may not be obtained though the invention ... if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains." Apple is saying this one is just an obvious application of pre-existing patents.
- acchow 7y ago> - They didn't just patent an idea. They built a whole system around it. REDCODE is not just a compression algorithm. It is a compression algorithm optimized for a certain type of professional movie camera, one that they invented. If they're so much more than a patent, then they shouldn't need a patent.
- ttoinou 7y ago- There are the first to do it. What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriflex_D-20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriflex_D-20 ? And video codecs already existed before RED... So basically it is about compressing the RAW output of the sensor.
- arghwhat 7y ago... Which has been done in photography for single frames far longer than this patent has been around. Adobe launched their DNG RAW format in 2004, for example. The only reason for not doing this to video earlier was just a question of bandwidth and storage limitations. RAW footage is massive, and we might have forgotten just how bad the storage situation was over a decade ago. As Apple says, RED has brought nothing to the table that an orangutan of average intellect would not have been able to come up with when storage mediums were finally capable of keeping up with RAW video footage.
- sschueller 7y agoREDs patent might not be valid according to this video [1]. Also red continues to label its products as "Made in the USA" when they are not qualifying the requirements set to be allowed to do so. In fact they may not even qualify to label the products "Assembled in the USA" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ20yQhMYx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ20yQhMYx4
- adreamingsoul 7y agoThe author of those videos has his own history of being sued/suing RED.
- ttoinou 7y agoBut did you watch the video (hence his arguments) to make up your mind? Maybe the fact that he's reporting about the patent is linked to his own history with RED
- rasz 7y agoat 34m18s you can see how author of video conveniently misses the date of first preliminary application to fit his narrative
- adreamingsoul 7y agoYes, I've watched several of his videos. This is a controversial topic that has been the subject of a lot of discussion lately with people who work in the industry, owners of RED cameras, and other significant stakeholders.
- Someone 7y agoDoes it legally matter when RED had this working, rather then when they filed for a patent? If so, it would seem you can game the system by documenting your invention well, only filing for a patent years later. Also, if that’s true, comparing when you made the invention to when others filed for a patent is unfair. That should be a concern for RED, as a comment on https://nofilmschool.com/red-camera-apple-patent-challenge https://nofilmschool.com/red-camera-apple-patent-challenge says: ”We were using a SI2K (Ari Presler camera) in August 2006... The first two shots of my reel were done with the first version of that camera, it was a sensor with a lens connected to a PC through Gigabit Ethernet... https://vimeo.com/351939975”* https://vimeo.com/351939975”*
- bluesign 7y agoAs I understand it matters against “prior art” defense. Basically if you patent someone else’s work, it invalidates the patent. But if you can prove that, you are the first to work on this, doesn’t really matter when you patented. Patenting years later is basically giving right to people to use your patent, if you started implementing before the patent date.
- IshKebab 7y agoYes. If they released it publicly in 2007 they can't then go and patent it in 2008.
- rasz 7y agothey had provisional application out in April 2007.
- johnny-lee 7y agoThe USA and certain other countries allow a grace period between disclosure of an invention and the patent application for that invention before that invention disclosure becomes prior art. For the USA, the grace period is 12 months, for other countries, it's 6 months.
- pedrow 7y agoThere's a a difference between 'first to file' and 'first to invent' in patents. Most (all?) territories use the former, but the US only changed in 2013. Not sure how that applies retrospectively. More detail in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_invent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inv...
- vfclists 7y agoFrom the company which patented rounded corners.
- yoz-y 7y agoFrom an engineering perspective this does seem trivial and something that would be on a table in almost any pipeline that needs to get a speedup and allows for post processing. But then a lot of patents seem to be frivolous.
- dusted 7y agoI just came here to remark that it is very ironic that apple is fighting for something that actually benefits not only themselves but everyone.
- mnd999 7y agoI guess it’s cheaper than buying RED, which is probably plan B
- thefounder 7y ago>>...didn't make a technological break-through - they simply combined two patents, just as any skilled artisan would have done. That's also valid for most patents from Apple including the iphone
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago"The iPhone" isn't a patent. There's one often-ridiculed "design patent" on the rounded-rectangle-in-a-grid home screen layout. But these "design patents" are a lot closer to copyright than actual patents. The mere existence of Android phones are proof that at least one of the following two believes or yours must be wrong: - That trivial stuff is easily patented - That Apple is willing to abuse the patent system for anti-competitive reasons.
- Matsta 7y agoAlso to note, this is probably the same reason why Blackmagic dropped CinemaDNG [1][2](Adobe's raw video format) and made their own version - Blackmagic Raw [3] [1]https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=87045 https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=87045 [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/ay3sm4/wtf_is_with_red_going_after_everyone_that_uses/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/ay3sm4/wtf_... [3]https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/blackmagicraw https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/blackmagicraw
- huffmsa 7y ago> Combining two existing patents isn't novel Okay, bevelled rectangles. Instead of pinching pennies like a depression era farmer, maybe Apple should spend some of that $250B in cash to aquire RED. They get the patent, and the royalties AND can put RED sensors in their iPhones and charge another $250/unit.