RED Files Lawsuit Against Nikon

[Andrew Reid]

 

7 hours ago, tupp said:

At the date the RED patent application was filed, there was absolutely no novelty nor innovation in specifying internal or external recording, so it was meaningless to do so (and even detrimental to RED), unless they were trying to appease an examiner who had no clue.

Right so let's get this straight Tupp.

You are saying that when you patent a cinema camera, there's no point describing how it works.

Internal recording, external via some cable to a separate box, all academic.

Frame rate... don't need to mention!

9fps, 16fps, 24fps all the same to a lawyer!

RED should just have saved themselves the bother and drew a picture of a square with the word CAMERA inside.

7 hours ago, tupp said:

I sense that the patent is weak, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it can't be successfully defended.

Patent wins vs Apple, Sony...

Weakness detected!

 

[cpc]

5 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Patent wins vs Apple, Sony...

Did it win, though?

Apparently Red settled with Sony after Sony counter sued for infringement. And Apple's case was dismissed for what looks, at least partially, like procedural reasons (basically due to incompleteness -- the decision uses the word "unclear" multiple times in relation to Apple's rationale and says literally "In sum, Petitioner’s obviousness challenge is unclear and incomplete"). That is, Apple lost, but it is not clear if the patent won.

[Davide DB]

On 6/10/2022 at 8:58 PM, cpc said:

Did it win, though?

We lost, for sure.

[Tim Sewell]

On 6/9/2022 at 7:28 PM, webrunner5 said:

24 frames a second was determined back in the 1920's maybe even teens as the slowest you could hand crank a film movie camera and make it not look jerky, any faster you were eating up too much film. It was all about the money, just like everything is now.

Absolutely. 100 years of cinema mainly filmed at 24fps means that people in general consider the result to be the most realistic depiction of motion. I would expect, if the entire industry switched to 60fps tomorrow then in another 100 years that would be considered the most realistic.

Given the prevalence of video games that might well happen.

[PannySVHS]

Kewl, everyone. Thanks for sharing insights.

I would love to see some Z9 experimental film fromus forum lovers or one with a Red is fine too. 🙂  There were some awesome posts in the Sony Cinealta F3 thread. Short glimpses into the image quality of the camera, fun to watch, often quick little sketches, crafted with passion and the illusion of effortlessness.

[Danko]

On 5/28/2022 at 1:30 PM, Andrew Reid said:

Yes please would be great to see some samples from the Z9, especially RAW.

Shoot it whilst you still can and before RED comes and takes it away 😉

Just a an update. RED still haven't shown up at my door. I did started locking up in the evening and hiding the camera in the safe houses. I started checking if I'm being followed.

On this side of sanity (hopefully), I finally shot some material. Clients I often collaborate with suggested that we try playing with format of the visual research and use moving picture. It's usually stills photographic work. Since the whole job was more of a exploration case study I decided I may as well push and shoot RAW.

I have mostly XQD cards and SD cards. XQD was able to record about 7 seconds of 8K at 50p before interrupting. Slight disappointment (but there was a twist later on). So I went and bought CFast B cards. San Disk were easiest to get quickly, 128GB holds 5 min 40 seconds at 8K60p and RAW quality NORMAL. I went with SDR and Nikon FLAT, used waveform and kept ISO at 64, partially because I carry the habit from the stills and partially to keep aperture values reasonable. I only played with the footage a bit on the flight back. In Resolve 17 on Mac (you have to run the app under Rosetta, so affecting the performance) it edits without issues on 16 inch M1 MAX. I've been out of serious video for more than 12 years so tweaking it is going to be a bit of challenge but also why I really tried to get it right in the camera. The picture didn't break when I pushed it hard in Resolve.

The camera's ergonomics are great for photography. For filming - I'm not used to stills cameras. I feel it basically needs to be rigged to get the best of what it offers. Monitoring is good, it has a mode where the LCD shows everything an assistant would need. Speaking of, the viewfinder on Z9 is the best I used on mirrorless camera. My workdays are sometimes 13, 14 hours and the eye strain can get too much (I'm squinting at you GFX 100s). I can't comment on the autofocus for video as all of the lenses I used were manual focus.

What might be the most interesting part for me is that camera runs really cold. I don't know what kind of processing TICORaw uses but the whole focus on low hardware requirements they've brought from their broadcasting background seems to be paying back. While the first part of the job was at 18 to 20 degrees Celsius and low humidity, the second one was at high 30s and low 40s with very  high humidity. The camera just kept going.

The card surprise that happened at the end was that I tried 8K normal quality RAW at 24 and 25 and XQD card recorded without issue for minutes on, full capacity, without problems.

This material can't be shared but if someone wants, I can shoot short and specific tests and send over the RAW footage. Maybe skin tones, cadence and highlight/shadows but not longer than 15 seconds each. Which brings me to the main problem of the RAW. You need a data wrangler and increased budgets for storage.

[M_Williams]

Andrew, let me describe two of the biggest issues with RED's patent, ignoring how insanely stupid it is to patent compressed RAW above 23fps:

1) Their patent was filed over a year after the camera was on the market. It is invalid on that basis alone.

2) The patent should never have been granted because it is SO GENERIC AND BROAD. It covers not truly lossless RAW video, but visually lossless RAW. What is the definition of visually lossless in the patent? That the average person can see no difference. That's literally it. None of RED's RAW video is actually lossless. If it were, why would you have options of 3:1, 5:1, 8:1, 12:1, 18:1, whatever they are - or now I believe they're just HQ, MQ, and LQ. None of those are truly lossless RAW like you can shoot in most stills cameras. They are lossy RAW. So, by being granted a patent for visually lossless (to the average person) RAW, they have effectively been given domain over both lossless AND lossy RAW.

Lossless and lossy RAW existed in stills form prior to RED developing a single thing. They took that and said "ok give us a patent on this except at 24fps or higher" - which, by the way, a number of cameras do now (there is no defined limit of time in RED's patent for how long it can shoot, because again, it's as broad and vague as you can possibly get).

It would be fair if they had a patent on REDCODE RAW, just as I'm sure BM has one on BRAW and Canon on C-RAW and so on. But to patent something that already existed - and simply taking it to the next logical extension - and then being granted that patent with excessively broad language is simply wrong.

It would be like if someone had patented all forms of audio compression. Instead, patents were filed on audio compression formats, like DPCM (the first) and coding standards (AAC, MP3, DC3, FLAC, etc.).

[Ryan Earl]

5 hours ago, M_Williams said:

1) Their patent was filed over a year after the camera was on the market. It is invalid on that basis alone.

In the US there is a 12 month grace period.  You can file after something's been on the market, the patent has a filing date in 2008, but a 'priority date' in 2007.  If nothing else you have time to prove that your product is viable before going through the pain and expense of a patent.  

 

5 hours ago, M_Williams said:

The patent should never have been granted because it is SO GENERIC AND BROAD. It covers not truly lossless RAW video, but visually lossless RAW. What is the definition of visually lossless in the patent?

RED's patent is designated with a "U" preceding the number which stands for 'utility' vs a 'design' patent.  Utility patents give their owners broad protection over the use of a new and useful process and they are allowed to invent on top of existing technology which counts as 'prior art.'  They disclosed a lot of prior art too referencing other video cameras on the market and stills.  

Visually lossless compressed raw is certainly not an unpatentable 'abstract idea' to me either because you do have options in camera to choose the amount of compression.  The camera is acting on the data physically compressing it in camera.

I think the problem is that RED chose to patent it in the first place, as opposed to other companies in the past getting together to form a standards group like JPEG.  JPEG is also based on patents too I believe, the companies that helped form it have allowed it to exist outside of patented IP.  

[kye]

1 hour ago, Ryan Earl said:

Visually lossless compressed raw is certainly not an unpatentable 'abstract idea' to me either because you do have options in camera to choose the amount of compression.  The camera is acting on the data physically compressing it in camera.

Everything can be measured.

If you put a bunch of people into a blind A/B/X testing setup leaded with uncompressed and compressed RAW images and more than, say, 65% of the time they could guess which was which then that wouldn't be visually lossless, whereas if they got it right <65% of the time then that could be interpreted as visually lossless.  These aren't the real numbers, but somewhere there will be a standard for "visually" and if not then one could be agreed during any legal process if that was required.

There is also the SSIM which is "a perceptual metric that quantifies image quality degradation":  https://www.imatest.com/docs/ssim/
Something like this might already be the established way to judge such things in the legal system, and it avoids the inconvenience of dealing with people in your testing process.

[webrunner5]

Red has just been a shit about the patent. They in this day and age could have ignored enforcing it through the legal channels and at least just have licensed it. But no, they have to curtail everyone who even wants to advance raw and bust everyone's balls over it. That shows me they are either evil as shit or SUPER concerned their product is really not that special, probably both apply.

[M_Williams]

Y'all left out the part where I said what the patent's definition of "visually lossless" is. It's not an Imatest or anything of the sort.

The fact of the matter is, Red RAW is NOT lossless. Again, if it were, you wouldn't have different compression options. Lossless is lossless, there would only be one compression ratio. It is lossy RAW but "lossless" because the average person can't see a difference.

[webrunner5]

The patent is about as dumb as one that says you are not allowed to sing in the key of C. Just crazy stuff.

[Ryan Earl]

On 7/3/2022 at 11:18 AM, M_Williams said:

What is the definition of visually lossless in the patent? That the average person can see no difference. That's literally it. None of RED's RAW video is actually lossless. If it were, why would you have options of 3:1, 5:1, 8:1, 12:1, 18:1, whatever they are - or now I believe they're just HQ, MQ, and LQ. None of those are truly lossless RAW like you can shoot in most stills cameras. They are lossy RAW. So, by being granted a patent for visually lossless (to the average person) RAW, they have effectively been given domain over both lossless AND lossy RAW.

 

7 hours ago, M_Williams said:

Y'all left out the part where I said what the patent's definition of "visually lossless" is.

RED, to my understanding of reading the patent, do not have a patent on lossless raw or uncompressed raw like the cDNG coming from the Sigma FP for example.

They’ve defined it as ‘compressed’ and that seems to be where it hangs up other companies and codecs like cinemaDNG 3:1, 4:1.  And likely compressed raw 4K and over as I’ve read Jim Jannard’s comments when Red sued Sony.  

For patent infringement or a patent claim, RED suing Sony or Nikon is more about the way the marketing is presented to the ordinary observer or average person who’s using the cameras.  Another company claiming a cinema camera at least 24fps at 4K with compression options like those in Nikon with ProRes Raw.  On its face those claims directly compete with RED, specifically the RED ONE going back to 2007, and their subsequent cameras.  They’ve had 4K compressed raw at 24fps for a long time!  The achievement / combination of features that’s being protected is all contained in the RED One.  They have a physical working example of their patent made in 2007.  

When it comes to validating the patent in litigation (RED has to reprove validity if they begin litigation as they did with Sony), or invalidating it as Apple tried to do, or initially awarding the patent, the patent system uses testimony from “a person with ordinary skill in the art.”  In this case camera / video engineers who would be responsible for building or designing the camera will attack or defend the patent.

Apple just tried to move RED’s priority date forward in a legal trick to make the RED One appear obvious in 2008.  Though I suspect it might still not have been by then.

The pictures that RED published from March 2007 in their case against Apple were of the engineering team for RED One comparing images side by side of lossless and ‘visually lossless compressed’ raw.  Then the RED One was sent on to be field tested with Peter Jackson and pictures of it on set with him.  So if it was good enough for Peter Jackson. . 

So what you have to do is come up with your reasoning on why it would have been ‘obvious’ to ‘a person of ordinary skill in the art’ in March 2007 or before to be able to invalidate the patent.  It’s not just that it could exist hypothetically, but achieving a novel method for compression.

There was compressed raw stills in the Nikon D2X in 2004 for example.  They had uncompressed and compressed NEF.  Though if RED considered it prior art to their patent and invented on top of that in a novel way achieving 4K 24fps and ‘visually lossless compressed’ and it was validated by the patent system then what can you do?  Nikon wasn’t attempting to compete in the cinema market in 2007.  One of RED’s key arguments I believe in the patent is that prior art was not good enough for cinema by not being visually lossless when compressed.  

I’m admittedly interested to find out how Nikon resolves this.

[Ilkka Nissila]

Nikon's compressed NEF stills (from the D2X era onwards) are indeed visually lossless (the highlights have high SNR but also high shot noise and they simply drop out some of the least significant bits which are covered by the shot noise in the highlights and that's how they achieved visually lossless compression) but the Nikon compression (of the D2X era) only reduces the file size by a small amount; the compression ratio is not as high as in the Red or the Intopix compression algorithms (the latter being used in the Z9). It is extremely difficult to see any difference between the D2X era (visually lossless) compressed and lossless compressed NEFs (and you'd need to do very aggressive curves adjustment to see any difference at all). But the difference in file size between the two formats is small. Red's approach could be considered to be an advancement in the state of the art by providing a higher degree of visually lossless compression than Nikon's. But Intopix's algorithm used in the Z9 also provides high compression ratios and was awared a patent. It is used by the Z9 for both stills and video. One could argue that since raw video is a trivial extension of raw stills at sufficiently high fps (24 or higher) and Nikon are simply using (visually lossless) compression on each frame (as they did in their still cameras since at least since the D2X) the use of such a method to record a raw video is a trivial extension of what Nikon did in the past, only this time with higher resolution and higher frame rate. The compression algorithm itself that is used by the Z9 for high efficiency raw stills and raw video is documented in Intopix's patent. Since it was awarded a patent it clearly includes a new inventive step. RED seem to claim in their lawsuit that Nikon are using RED's technology and not someone else's. Interesting. The patent system was created to foster innovation and to allow the rising of sufficient funding for research and development of new useful things. Here it is used by one company to try to block competition which is offering a superior product (in some ways, i.e. autofocus) at a 90% lower price (maybe more) from entering the market (which is not really the same market as the Z9 is mainly a still camera with some video capabilities and most of its purchasers are likely mainly using it for still photography simply because Nikon isn't a prominent video let alone cinema brand). If RED prevail then this is an example of the patent system damaging the American customers' opportunities to purchase competitive gear and not in any way fostering innovation. Perhaps the customers can just purchase their Z9's from overseas in the future.

[KnightsFan]

On 7/8/2022 at 1:16 PM, Ilkka Nissila said:

Red's approach could be considered to be an advancement in the state of the art by providing a higher degree of visually lossless compression than Nikon's.

Red's encoding is Jpeg 2000, which has been around since 2000 and provides any compression ratio you want with a subjective cutoff where it's visually lossless (as does every algorithm). Jpeg 2000 has been used for DCP's since 2004 with a compression ratio of about 12:1. So there was actually a pretty long precedent of motion pictures using the the exact algorithm and at a high compression ratio before Red did it.

Red didn't add anything in terms of compression technique or ratios. They just applied existing algorithms to bayer data, the way photo cameras did, instead of RGB data.

[Video Hummus]

7 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

They just applied existing algorithms to bayer data, the way photo cameras did, instead of RGB data.

This is it.

All the other language about "greater than 23fps" and "4K or higher" or "internal, visually lossless" is all written to broaden the patent intentionally as a, in my opinion, blatant "idea" smash and grab.

They only came up with a method and instead they got a patent for essentially: "visually lossless compressed bayer data in a camera at greater than 23fps and 4K and up resolution".

Ford invented a novel form of locomotion via a box ("vehicle") with 4 or more wheels, powered by an internal combustion engine (as described in prior patent XYZ), moving at speeds greater than 23mph.

Ford is calling it a "motorized vehicle" and will sue anybody that tries to use wheels and internal combustion engines to go faster than 23mph.

[Juank]

https://www.cined.com/nikon-z-9-firmware-v2-10-released-n-raw-is-here-to-stay/

[BTM_Pix]

Well it looks like Nikon are up for a fight over this.

https://www.slashcam.de/news/single/Interne-RAW-Aufnahme--Nikon-haelt-RED-Patente-fuer-u-17452.html

"Nikon disputes the validity of the RED patents, arguing that they were applied for too late at the time and should therefore not have been granted. Nikon points out that RED already offered a camera for pre-order at NAB 2006, in which the relevant codec technology was integrated, but it took more than a year before a patent application was filed. The patent, which was only registered after the fixed one-year period had expired, was wrongly granted from Nikon's point of view, since the patent office had no information that the technology had already been implemented and offered for advance sale"

Seems they are going down the route of "the only thing we've violated in the Z9 is a patent that should never have been granted in the first place".

Not to mention, of course, the defence of "how can we be violating a patent when we can't get our arse in gear sufficiently to actually deliver the fucking camera anyway".

At this rate, RED could probably sue them for infringing their patent on painfully delayed availability of cameras after launch. 

Although, as I've said before, I do wonder whether the lawsuit and the tight availability are actually linked.

 

[hansel]

On 7/7/2022 at 6:52 AM, webrunner5 said:

The patent is about as dumb as one that says you are not allowed to sing in the key of C. Just crazy stuff.

Well, there are lawsuits about chord progessions in specific scales. So some lawyers argued that, e.g. a progression in a key in minor pentatonic is copy righted. It's a very sad world.

[BTM_Pix]

25 minutes ago, hansel said:

Well, there are lawsuits about chord progessions in specific scales. So some lawyers argued that, e.g. a progression in a key in minor pentatonic is copy righted. It's a very sad world.

Synth reviewers on YouTube are plagued by copyright strikes when they demonstrate filter sweeps as someone has managed to convince the YouTube content review clowns that they own the copyright to the sound of a filter sweep.

If I could convince YouTube that I own the copyright to the phrases "Hey, whats up, its your boy..", "with that being said", "lets get into it" and "I have been sent this for free but..." then I'd be rolling in it.