Jinni.Tech vs. RED Part 4 (1hr long)

[IronFilm]

11 hours ago, sanveer said:

And his ignorance made him win Round 1 against RED which probably hired lawyers who charged as much per appearence, as most middle class Americans make in a year (and I am guessing way more than you make per appearance, if coursework is your forte). It's the same company that won the strangest Patent suits against Apple and a host of other multibillion-dollar  corporations. 

He's not going to be listing precedents, and all provision of law online. Or structure his actual arguments either. People are already whining that they can't understand anything, they will probably start jumping of off buildings, if he makes it any more technical. 

Exactly. You can't win with some people:
Simplify it too much and they'll say it is "too simple".
Go into too many details and they'll accuse him of making "conspiracy truther-style videos".

He's already put out many videos, for a series that is hours upon hours long! Can you seriously say with a straight face that he's simplified it too much and should make his videos even longer?? (I think he should do the opposite, and keep the current videos but also make a 2nd series which is a 5 or even 2 minute trimmed down edit summary of each of the long form videos)

[rawshooter]

3 hours ago, IronFilm said:

"Truther-style videos"?? Wow. 
Clearly you either didn't watch his videos at all, or you did but just didn't comprehend them. As they after all covering YEARS of documented history of RED, and many aspects that RED has done wrong. (but yes, at the core it is all about the MiniMags like @BTM_Pix highlighted) If he was to try and just as thoroughly cover it with an article, that could easily turn into a multi series of them as well! You can't properly cover all of that in just a few paragraphs. But even a casual browsing of your videos should be enough for you to catch onto the history of lying and deception RED has been engaging in. 

I've got no problem with Jinni Tech choosing to use video format to tell it, not everyone is an expert journalist & skilled wordsmith, if he feels more comfortable in the video format (no surprise, he's a filmmaker) then that is what he should do. Plus I feel the visual medium works for what he's doing. 

This is such a major story (at least in our little niche of the world) that numerous others have covered this news as well, such as: Linus Torvalds, Newsshooter, CineD, RedSharkNews, ymcinema, NoFilmSchool, etc.... none of them are calling it "truther-style videos". 
 

Just checking:

- Linus Torvalds - I couldn't find any mention, not even on LKLM.org (the Linux development mailing list). Do you have a pointer?

- Newsshooter: a single mention in an article one year ago on the "highly inflated prices" of the RED mags, https://www.newsshooter.com/2019/07/17/red-drops-prices-on-mini-mags-media/, no mention or coverage of the new video.

- CineD/C5D: same as Newsshooter, https://www.cined.com/red-mini-mag-and-redmag-controversy-second-video/

etc.etc.

I could find no coverage of the recent video anywhere on those sites. 

So what do Jinni Tech's supposedly so disruptive revelations actually tell? That RED uses inflated prices for its hardware, that it has a shady history of re-registering its company in different states and with different legal constructions, and that it puts EULA clauses into its products that give it a free pass from liability which is likely in violation of laws.

Yes, I agree that this is shady business practice. But you know what? This is how the entire tech industry works (actually, how capitalism works but I don't want to get into a political debate here). Look at Apple, for example:  grossly inflated prices for its accessories and replacement parts, shutting out third-party repair technicians by legal clauses, throttling its iPhones with older batteries without telling customers (i.e. actually having lied to customers for years), locking you into its EULAs with the iCloud tie-in of its products (just like Google, Microsoft and everyone else - only taking Apple as one example here). And guess what: Until recently, Apple was officially not a U.S., but a Dutch- and Irish-registered company for reasons of tax evasion. 

So I stand by statement: Jinni Tech's revelations are on the level of truther videos and are only shocking to people who must have very naive and idealistics concepts of how businesses do business.  

 

[Ed David]

39 minutes ago, rawshooter said:

Just checking:

- Linus Torvalds - I couldn't find any mention, not even on LKLM.org (the Linux development mailing list). Do you have a pointer?

- Newsshooter: a single mention in an article one year ago on the "highly inflated prices" of the RED mags, https://www.newsshooter.com/2019/07/17/red-drops-prices-on-mini-mags-media/, no mention or coverage of the new video.

- CineD/C5D: same as Newsshooter, https://www.cined.com/red-mini-mag-and-redmag-controversy-second-video/

etc.etc.

I could find no coverage of the recent video anywhere on those sites. 

So what do Jinni Tech's supposedly so disruptive revelations actually tell? That RED uses inflated prices for its hardware, that it has a shady history of re-registering its company in different states and with different legal constructions, and that it puts EULA clauses into its products that give it a free pass from liability which is likely in violation of laws.

Yes, I agree that this is shady business practice. But you know what? This is how the entire tech industry works (actually, how capitalism works but I don't want to get into a political debate here). Look at Apple, for example:  grossly inflated prices for its accessories and replacement parts, shutting out third-party repair technicians by legal clauses, throttling its iPhones with older batteries without telling customers (i.e. actually having lied to customers for years), locking you into its EULAs with the iCloud tie-in of its products (just like Google, Microsoft and everyone else - only taking Apple as one example here). And guess what: Until recently, Apple was officially not a U.S., but a Dutch- and Irish-registered company for reasons of tax evasion. 

So I stand by statement: Jinni Tech's revelations are on the level of truther videos and are only shocking to people who must have very naive and idealistics concepts of how businesses do business.  

 

Can you give some examples that Red.COM llc is a very normalized case of a tech company?  I find they are more unique and acting exactly like patent troll companies.  They bully, silence, and accuse and DOX publically a competitor - in this case, Jinnitech, with their own SSDs that work in their camera.

As the video shows, red had no patent at the time on their interface - they just had a patent application.  

And how many companies switched from a INC to a LLC and declared zero assets?  I could find no precedent of this.  Imagine if Apple, INC or Alphabet, INC (Google's parent company) did this because of class-action lawsuits.

This is an exemplary news story.  And one that will get wider coverage in business and tech and entertainment news sites, once they get the info they need.

It's an investigate journalism story - and sadly - now a days - very few publications can do this kind of work.

You should be thankful of Jinnitech - they are exposing corporate fraud that seems to have in its business model - litigation vs innovation.  

That's not healthy for our industry.  That's not healthy for us, the end users.  

Innovation is a beautiful thing, and the reason why we have now an industry so affordable in its quality goods for such a low price that it has launched a whole new younger generation of voices that would not have been possible 20 years ago.

Before Covid, I just came back from a job in Kenya at a refugee camp.  I worked with an amazing cinematographer and filmmaker who was a refugee!  His imagery is more impressive by far than mine.  A refugee who made around 40 dollars a year.  Through youtube on his mobile phone and a canon 5d given to him by a UN film program.  Their voices are finally being heard from their perspective, not from westerners.

 

 

[Video Hummus]

Tax evasion is illegal in most countries. Legal loopholes that simulate tax evasion are not. They are too different things. It’s all in the name of course “loophole” - a hole in the law to slip through.

We wouldn’t get on a ship that had a “loophole” for water to go through. Not sure why it’s ok for business to have the same for the law!

It’s fine for “businesses to do business” this way until they get caught or until people get fed up with finding out their favorite multi-billion dollar company (almost trillion dollar company) pays less in taxes than your sick grandma each year.

For some people, mostly rich people, that is “business as usual” but at some point people find out about this and:

1. Wonder why they can’t do the same.
2. Get mad as fuck in the unfairness of it.

So as much as I would like to not pay taxes by funneling my business income through some shell company in a offshore account managed by my 5th cousin twice removed in Lichtenstein, I find that kind of behavior wrong and anti-greater good.

So paying up the ass for low-quality commodity flash storage, a la REDMiniMag, and potentially lying to your customers about it, we shall see how the court finds it, I guess depends on which side of the money exchange you are on....

In my opinion JinniTech is fighting the good fight here for consumers.

[rawshooter]

1 hour ago, Video Hummus said:

In my opinion JinniTech is fighting the good fight here for consumers.

Please give me a break, this a business suing a business.

If we're turning this debate to one of "good vs. evil", we should go to churches, join cults or watch superhero movies. 

If you want to support a good cause, have a non-profit NGO like the EFF sue corporations like RED (or Apple, or basically the whole industry), but never trust another company.

[Video Hummus]

1 hour ago, rawshooter said:

Please give me a break, this a business suing a business.

If we're turning this debate to one of "good vs. evil", we should go to churches, join cults or watch superhero movies. 

If you want to support a good cause, have a non-profit NGO like the EFF sue corporations like RED (or Apple, or basically the whole industry), but never trust another company.

I never said it was good versus evil.

I said it’s my opinion JinniTech is doing the right thing by suing RED for an unfair, consumer terms of service contract. Bruce is a customer of RED products after all.

By the way, A non-profit is in-fact a business. They don’t magically good badge of honor because they are a non-profit. The NRA is a non-profit and they are now being sued as well.

[rawshooter]

1 hour ago, Video Hummus said:

I never said it was good versus evil.

You brought in the moral category of the "good cause"...

Anyway, we could also extend the cause to other small-scale camera manufacturers. Take Digital Bolex, for example. When they were still in business, they pretended to be a filmmaker-run Kickstarter grassroots project. In reality, however, a company "Digital Bolex" never existed,  but the actual company was the large-scale Canadian electronics manufacturer Ienso. The people who posed, on fairs and in social media, as the "Digital Bolex" founders, were neither company owners, nor camera designers, but hired social media influencers.

On top of that, the supposed Digital Bolex D16 prototype presented at the SXSW festival to launch the Kickstarter campaign was a disguised third-party camera by another manufacturer (the Prosilica GX2300). Later, the company registration was changed from California and Canada to a letterbox company address in Delaware. Enough material for shocking YouTube revelations - objectively even more shocking than what's currently being 'revealed' about RED.

Nevertheless, the D16 turned out to be a real product, wasn't exactly affordable, and people were and still are happy with it.

Bottom line: I still fail to see how RED's business practices are categorically worse than those common in the industry. (And if you want to pick a really bad case, just take Olympus with their corruption scandal and past ties to Japanese organized crime.)

[rawshooter]

5 hours ago, Ed David said:

Can you give some examples that Red.COM llc is a very normalized case of a tech company?

Out of my head:

• How HP and other printer manufacturers shut out third-party ink cartridge suppliers by putting DRM chips into their printers that would cause the printers to stop working and spew out error messages if you used a third-party ink cartridge. HP (and other "original" printer manufacturer) ink is several times more expensive per liter than Chanel No. 5 perfume and vintage Scotch whiskey. In fact, RED only copied the HP business model with its RED mags.
• How practically all camera manufacturers use DRM chips in their batteries to block the use of third-party batteries, and spread FUD (fear/uncertainty/doubt) that third-party batteries will damage your camera. - Just this week, I'm struggling with third-party battery error/warning messages from a Sony mirrorless camera after I installed a firmware update. 
• How Amazon sues all web stores that implement 1-click-buy buttons.
• How Apple sued everyone who used the word "App Store". 
• How Microsoft earns more patent royalties from Android licenses than from its own operating systems.
• How the MPEG-LA sues everyone who uses the h264 codec without paying them license fees.

 

[Video Hummus]

You forgot to put RED on that list of yours.

Anyway, your argument is business as usual is filled with all kinds of shady stuff and since its a regular occurrence its OK?

I fail to see how this revelation changes the argument that RED is being sued for shady business practices. The same as RED claimed against JinniTech. Which us what is being discussed in this topic.

[Ed David]

6 hours ago, rawshooter said:

Out of my head:

• How HP and other printer manufacturers shut out third-party ink cartridge suppliers by putting DRM chips into their printers that would cause the printers to stop working and spew out error messages if you used a third-party ink cartridge. HP (and other "original" printer manufacturer) ink is several times more expensive per liter than Chanel No. 5 perfume and vintage Scotch whiskey. In fact, RED only copied the HP business model with its RED mags.
• How practically all camera manufacturers use DRM chips in their batteries to block the use of third-party batteries, and spread FUD (fear/uncertainty/doubt) that third-party batteries will damage your camera. - Just this week, I'm struggling with third-party battery error/warning messages from a Sony mirrorless camera after I installed a firmware update. 
• How Amazon sues all web stores that implement 1-click-buy buttons.
• How Apple sued everyone who used the word "App Store". 
• How Microsoft earns more patent royalties from Android licenses than from its own operating systems.
• How the MPEG-LA sues everyone who uses the h264 codec without paying them license fees.

 

To paraphrase you, @rawshooter

your defense of red is:

"Every other tech company has done illegal and/or bullying tactics before (including Olympus hiring the Yakuza) , so there is precedent for fraud and this makes it okay.  That is completely normalized behavior.

Here in America, in the 19th century, slavery was not just common, but built into the fabric of the Southern US economy.  It was the accepted form of the economic output of America.  And yet, slavery, I think we can all agree is not normalized today.  In fact, slavery is illegal today in the United States.

Therefore activists and journalists and filmmakers should exist to point out the problem of this, just as filmmakers in our cases exist to tell stories that empower and bring awareness to different conditions and issues facing our modern lives.  We should thanks filmmakers and journalists when they bring issues like this to the forefront.  For example, the filmmakers who made Black Fish, completely changed the public's understanding of Sea World.  So did Gasland, as it brought awareness to the danger of fracking.

One more thought from me about Red.  When Red started, they were a massive innovator.  They changed the face of digital cinema with the red one.  Before that, the closest digital cinematic cameras cost $400,000 or more. With the red one, as well as the Canon 5D, everything changed.  High end cinematography became within reach of many more people.

Now it is red that is trying to hold back innovation.  That alone makes the story of Red via Jinnitech, to those who remember the incredible story of Red even the more fascinating.

[Ed David]

One more thing, @rawshooter.  We all just want compressed raw on our cameras that doesn't cause massive overheating and record limits of 20 seconds.   Don't you want that on your panasonic s1h or non-BMD camera to have this option?  Pro Res RAW is like 10x more efficient that 4k Pro Res 4444.  It seems pretty amazing.   Don't you want to give all of us that?   Come on, man.  Let us just have this one thing 🙂  It's my birthday soon.  Pretty please!

[Ed David]

8 hours ago, rawshooter said:

You brought in the moral category of the "good cause"...

Anyway, we could also extend the cause to other small-scale camera manufacturers. Take Digital Bolex, for example. When they were still in business, they pretended to be a filmmaker-run Kickstarter grassroots project. In reality, however, a company "Digital Bolex" never existed,  but the actual company was the large-scale Canadian electronics manufacturer Ienso. The people who posed, on fairs and in social media, as the "Digital Bolex" founders, were neither company owners, nor camera designers, but hired social media influencers.

On top of that, the supposed Digital Bolex D16 prototype presented at the SXSW festival to launch the Kickstarter campaign was a disguised third-party camera by another manufacturer (the Prosilica GX2300). Later, the company registration was changed from California and Canada to a letterbox company address in Delaware. Enough material for shocking YouTube revelations - objectively even more shocking than what's currently being 'revealed' about RED.

Nevertheless, the D16 turned out to be a real product, wasn't exactly affordable, and people were and still are happy with it.

Bottom line: I still fail to see how RED's business practices are categorically worse than those common in the industry. (And if you want to pick a really bad case, just take Olympus with their corruption scandal and past ties to Japanese organized crime.)

Digital Bolex - whether this is true or not-  and I am now friends with Joe the founder- yes I would love to see a video about all your revelations which I have never heard about until you wrote this.  Do you have links to this info?  I'm happy to ask Joe about this.    

here's his linked in:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/politeinpublic

If he's really a social media influencer in disguise, he doesn't seem to have the biggest following for that:

https://twitter.com/theycallmejoe?lang=en

 

 

But the difference between digital bolex and red is that red is a patent troll with a patent that does not hold water, that is keeping your Sigma FP from having Pro Res RAW. And furthermore, The DB16, to the best of my knowledge, never sued or harassed or threatened litigation against filmmakers or bloggers.

[IronFilm]

13 hours ago, Ed David said:

Can you give some examples that Red.COM llc is a very normalized case of a tech company?  I find they are more unique and acting exactly like patent troll companies.  They bully, silence, and accuse and DOX publically a competitor - in this case, Jinnitech, with their own SSDs that work in their camera.

As the video shows, red had no patent at the time on their interface - they just had a patent application.  

And how many companies switched from a INC to a LLC and declared zero assets?  I could find no precedent of this.  Imagine if Apple, INC or Alphabet, INC (Google's parent company) did this because of class-action lawsuits.

This is an exemplary news story.  And one that will get wider coverage in business and tech and entertainment news sites, once they get the info they need.

It's an investigate journalism story - and sadly - now a days - very few publications can do this kind of work.

You should be thankful of Jinnitech - they are exposing corporate fraud that seems to have in its business model - litigation vs innovation.  

That's not healthy for our industry.  That's not healthy for us, the end users.  

Innovation is a beautiful thing, and the reason why we have now an industry so affordable in its quality goods for such a low price that it has launched a whole new younger generation of voices that would not have been possible 20 years ago.

He's also shown a long history of RED outright lying to their customers. 
In the past I've tended to categorize RED into the "over promises - under delivers" type of company (such as "3K for 3K", to give one of many many many examples), which isn't "normalized" in the tech industry but it isn't totally abnormal either. 
While this outright lying to their consumers that RED does? That's not "normalized" in the industry (and if you think it is... ??? Well, that's sad! But even so, that should be no excuse for you to not stand up and fight against it). 

 

11 hours ago, rawshooter said:

If you want to support a good cause, have a non-profit NGO like the EFF sue corporations like RED (or Apple, or basically the whole industry), but never trust another company.

I support the EFF as well, and they're doing great work too, but you can't expect EFF to be everywhere. 
 

10 hours ago, Video Hummus said:

By the way, A non-profit is in-fact a business. They don’t magically good badge of honor because they are a non-profit. 

Yes, and this is why I also say you as a videographer/filmmaker shouldn't give a non-profit a discount just because they're a non-profit (although they're often trying that angle with us!). 

 

53 minutes ago, Ed David said:

One more thought from me about Red.  When Red started, they were a massive innovator.  They changed the face of digital cinema with the red one.  Before that, the closest digital cinematic cameras cost $400,000 or more. With the red one, as well as the Canon 5D, everything changed.  High end cinematography became within reach of many more people.

Now it is red that is trying to hold back innovation.  That alone makes the story of Red via Jinnitech, to those who remember the incredible story of Red even the more fascinating.

Exactly, just because RED arguably "did good" in the past, don't mean we should give them a free pass forever into the future. 
From my perspective, Epic Dragon was "peak RED". Was all upwards rapid progress to the Epic Dragon, but since then RED has stalled out or even go backwards relative to the rest of the industry. 
 

44 minutes ago, Ed David said:

yes I would love to see a video about all your revelations which I have never heard about until you wrote this.  Do you have links to this info?

It is an open secret, you can see the Prosilica GX2300 machine vision camera in their own BTS promo video Digital Bolex published themselves:

https://vimeo.com/38252059

I don't buy the argument that they were simply "repackaging the Prosilica GX2300", because:
1) there is nothing "simple" about that
2) they added a lot of features that filmmakers want which the GX2300 doesn't have
3) the Prosilica GX2300 sold for $5,660, while the Digital Bolex was a lot less! 
4) they just used the Prosilica GX2300 as a way to test out the sensor itself, to see if the sensor was suitable to base their camera around it

[Shaocaholica]

Ah yes. Jinnitech, a ‘company’ run by a single person is just on the same moral standing as Red.

 

If Apple decided to crush a hot dog stand ‘company’ of one employee operator well that’s just the business world for ya!  Nothing to see here.

[Ed David]

5 hours ago, Shaocaholica said:

Ah yes. Jinnitech, a ‘company’ run by a single person is just on the same moral standing as Red.

 

If Apple decided to crush a hot dog stand ‘company’ of one employee operator well that’s just the business world for ya!  Nothing to see here.

Yea but to use your example.  Imagine if Apple decided to  sue a hot dog stand for patent infringement, and didn't even have a patent at the time.  And the hot dog stand won in court.  And is now counter suing Apple for libel, defamation, etc etc.  I think most people would be on the side of the hot dog stand.  With the David vs Goliath parable, I feel like most people root for David 🙂 .  Only recently do we seem to have a pop culture that sides with Goliath.  

[BTM_Pix]

I'd be very confused in the David v Goliath hot dog analogy if the vendor had one of these carts.

 

[rawshooter]

Speaking of which:

Apple just took legal action against a small company for its "Prepear" app that allows to plan meals, arguing that its pear logo was an infringement of Apple's logo:

"Prepear says that it is a 'very small business' with only five team members, and explains that legal costs from the dispute have already cost thousands of dollars and the layoff of a team member."

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/08/legal-action-against-company-with-pear-logo/

 

So, here you have the equivalency of the hot dog stand. I'm not saying that RED's business practices aren't despicable, I'm only saying that they're common in the industry.

[rawshooter]

9 hours ago, IronFilm said:

I don't buy the argument that they were simply "repackaging the Prosilica GX2300", because:
 

I didn't write this, I only wrote that they presented a Prosilica GX2300 as the D16 prototype at SXSW when the Digital Bolex project made its first public appearance, and launched its Kickstarter campaign - so I actually said the same that you said!

And just for fun/entertainment:
Here's some interesting coverage of the litigation history between Blackmagic and Atomos:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1892682b-5576-4997-8b87-1c750c6a768d

[IronFilm]

36 minutes ago, rawshooter said:

And just for fun/entertainment:
Here's some interesting coverage of the litigation history between Blackmagic and Atomos:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1892682b-5576-4997-8b87-1c750c6a768d

Yes, it's infamous the bad blood between these two Australian companies. Apparently Atomos was founded by someone who split away from Blackmagic. 

[rawshooter]

24 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Yes, it's infamous the bad blood between these two Australian companies. Apparently Atomos was founded by someone who split away from Blackmagic. 

Yes, and then Blackmagic sued him over taking away trade secrets (I linked to a summary of the lawsuit).

As a result of that feud, we now have Blackmagic pushing its BRAW and not supporting ProRes RAW in Resolve, because it's Atomos technology. Atomos conversely pushes ProRes RAW which it jointly developed with Apple - and for which it pays license fees to RED, since RED legally threatened Atomos over breaching its compressed RAW video camera patent.

As a result of all these shenanigans, RAW video is a f*cked-up mess. (Again, I'm just bringing up all these examples to show the whole tech industry is Machiavellian, with lawsuits over overpriced proprietary technology being its routine business.)