Judge nixes Apple's bid to patent-bash bankrupt Kodak A US judge has refused to let Apple kick Eastman Kodak while it's down by halting the iPad maker's patent infringement litigation against the bankrupt biz. The fruity firm is freaking out because it's afraid that Kodak will flog its precious patents to sort out its dire finances. Judge Allan Gropper, sitting in a US …
Except the buyer will have to satisy their bankers/shareholders they are going to get a good return on the $2.6bn. That means extracting every bit of genuine royalty and probably a lot that is too difficult or expensive for the user to defend.
The latter is bad for ... well just really bad for society and the economy.
kodak's hope is to sell it's patent and use the 2.6bn (although after a bidding war, i guess Apple will pay them 5bn for them) to restart the business? But what hope have they got, really? If their business was workable, they wouldn't have had to file for bankrupcy.
They should just flog the patents, pay off their debts, then take the rest to the beach. Where, presumably, they can take lots of photographs in an ironic way.
didnt almost every camera manufacturer who made digital cameras have a viewfinder built into every device from the start?
therefore how can apple claim to have a patent on it?
or is another one of those "oh look, we got granted that patent, those idiots!!! now lets sue everybody!" things?
"I thought there was a "non-obvious" requirement?"
I totally agree. Furthermore, "showing *stuff* on a screen" is undobtedly covered-implied in the original patent for screens. This is another example of the way the patent system is broken, and how it is slowing down our technological advance rate.
The need to do so is obvious. The means by which you do it? Perhaps not. There exists the remote possibility they could have found a novel way of doing it that was quicker, easier, cheaper, or more accurate than anything currently being done elsewhere. Unfortunately, given the quality of other patents we know have been issued, I'm doubtful Apple really did anything new.
So when did Apple patent this? If I haul out my old 17 inch illyama CRT from the cellar, am I no longer in breach of copyright? Technically GUI's and videos are just a fast rendering of static images, so are they all in breach? Can we go back to the Xerox system that inspired Bill & Stevie and just say screw you, prior art now FOAD?
Atom bomb, well because someone really should set one off at 1 infininte loop, Cupertino...
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Go right back to the earliest days of photography! A photographer put a ground glass plate into his camera and ducked under the hood to adjust the focus, aperture, framing etc. That's a preview! Then he replaced the ground glass screen with a photographic plate, and waited until it was exposed (which for the earliest photographs, was minutes or even hours, not milliseconds).
The idea of preview (obvious in the first place IMHO, and I don't think it was ever patented) already existed.
In a digital world, the idea of continuing to provide a preview is obvious. In fact I should not even call it an "idea", just a routine provision.
The patent in question is the result of Kodak and Apple co-developing the Quicktake digital camera. The patent was initially registered by Apple
When Apple dropped the Quicktake, they told Kodak,that it could have the patent and try and improved upon it.
When things started to go seriously bad for them (early last year), Kodak decided to sue and Apple and Rim using this same patent.
Late last year Apple countersued saying they owned the patent and therefore shouldn't be used against them.
The request to sue during Bankruptcy proceeding has been made to avoid the sales of said patent which belongs to Apple in the first place and could make a complicate situation worse.
The judge decision is in line with the jurisprudence as the usage is not to sue companies during bankruptcy proceedings, however I really can't understand the other posters Apple bashing in this case.
"The request to sue during Bankruptcy proceeding has been made to avoid the sales of said patent which belongs to Apple in the first place and could make a complicate situation worse."
They either own it or not. If this is truly the case, it would be the same as me going to my childhood friend and take back the R/C truck I gave him on his 7th birthday because I don't like him anymore.
"it would be the same as me going to my childhood friend and take back the R/C truck I gave him on his 7th birthday because I don't like him anymore."
What??!! You don't like me anymore and this is how you choose to tell me. Well you can have your R/C truck back. I wanted a baseball anyway!
>When Apple dropped the Quicktake, they told Kodak,that it could have the patent and try and improved upon it.
Apple didn't drop the Quicktake, consumers didn't want it. Jobs ditched it and other loss makers as soon as he returned to a near bankrupt Apple - which Kodak could have bought at the time with pocket change.
In any case, by then Quicktake was a rebranded Fuji camera rather than a rebranded Kodak camera. It was not 'co-developed' in the sense you're implying, unless you count enclosure design and marketing.
The '218 patent, known as the image preview patent, covers the use of a smaller image file than the actual stored image: so if you are using an 8 megapixel camera, you don't have to display the full 8 megapixel data as the user pans around, you down-sample and show an image that is the same as the one that will be taken, but at a smaller resolution.
The allows for LCDs that are lower resolution than the sensor, and faster refresh times on the LCD.
Actually quite clever, really.
I used to like Apple stuff and the company many moons ago, they seemed to be on the right track between being a bastard corp and great product seller but whiff of "fame" and shed load of cash is enough to turn anyone's head I suppose. I bought an iMac around 2008 and have enjoyed it ever since but I never subscribed to the iPhone frenzy, going Android instead. The iMac is getting very long in the tooth now after ever more of these stories I have very strong feeling that MS and the PC component makers are going to be getting my custom again.
Sure I know business is business and they're all as bad as each other but there's something about this nasty little action of kicking the struggling Kodak and trying to stop them from selling their IP to save themselves that seems utterly despicable. Of course the iPhone/iPad lick-spittles will never read this story and will carry on thinking everything Cuppertino is wonderful, times have changed and what goes up often comes down with a huge crash. Apple you read the Kodak story well, what goes around comes around.
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