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.