In a legal argument that could enable the use of Rawcode in Apple products sans licensing fee, Apple has requested for a review to potentially invalidate a patent owned by high-performance camera maker Red relating to its proprietary Rawcode RAW recording format.
Malcolm Owen for AppleInsider:
Filed on May 6, the petition from Apple to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office calls for an Inter Partes review of patent number 9,245,314 titled simply “Video Camera.”
The patent largely describes a camera that can “capture, compress, and store video image data in a memory of the video camera, but really it pertains more to Rawcode, Red’s format for holding RAW footage, unprocessed imaging data from the sensor. Apple believes that some of the claims of the patent are “unpatentable,” and that the patent itself should be invalidated…
The invalidation of the patent would provide a number of benefits to Apple, including being able to effectively use aspects of Rawcode in its products, or in its entirety, without paying a licensing fee to Red. It is also plausible that the patent review request is in response to legal action from Red against Apple, possibly over the iPhone maker’s ProRES RAW format.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll see if there are more legal shoes to drop over Apple’s ProRES RAW and Red.
“…The invalidation of the patent would provide a number of benefits to Apple, including being able to effectively use aspects of Rawcode in its products, or in its entirety, without paying a licensing fee to Red….’ Yeah… because Apple LOVES other companies using their products without paying a licensing fee….
If anyone else did this, MDN would call them patent trolls.
For some background on this: RED has been holding legal action over any company attempting to create their own RAW compression codec even if they are NOT using the same algorithms RED developed (which are excellent). The part of the patent being called into question is if a company invents a new piece of code for their equipment that is a novel function (here compressing RAW camera data), does that company now have the right to prevent any other company to achieve the same results with their own equipment but with a different method? So if Apple wants to deliver RAW video data from an iPhone using their own compression technique, do they have to pay a licensing fee to RED even though no RED code is being used?
So the question is: is the result patented or the method? Example: can a dishwasher manufacturer patent the result of clean dishes (meaning that everyone who cleans their dishes now owes them a fee) or only the unique method they invented?
Software patents are patently wrong. A major mistake.
An algorithm IS a mathematical function, which is unpatentable.