another sad day with patents

[neo75903]

read this:
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041002/BUSINESS/410020333/1001

Looks like M$ also has to be careful. Kodak's description sounds very OLE alike as well.

[Mug Funky]

wow! i can't believe how angry i am!

just because Kodak have made a big ****ing mess of their company, doesn't mean they can do this kind of stuff. they're blaming digital cameras for their huge losses, when they simply should have seen it coming (incidentally, they just closed a film making factory in Melbourne citing the same reasons).

business models have to have some kind of foresight. i wonder if oil companies will start suing for lost revenue when people begin to adopt alternative fuels? my bet is that they will. just like the RIAA got all stroppy that people suddenly didn't need vast, top-heavy distro chains anymore.

progress happens. people shouldn't sue over it, they should grow the **** up and get a life.

[Didée]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
i wonder if oil companies will start suing for lost revenue when people begin to adopt alternative fuels?
Never fear. Behind the scenes, the oil lobby is doing its best to prevent usage of alternative energies from taking place. What d'you think how many patents have been bought up and rest in secure safes 'til they become dust. One could become angry indeed.

[neo75903]

Dont worry there is still China, China doesnr care about Patents right now coz they dont have many at the moment right now :)

China Give us Alternative Fuel nooowww :)

[Sirber]

Isn't VB6 like this too? It require external DLLs to operate, same way as Java.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
wow! i can't believe how angry i am!

just because Kodak have made a big ****ing mess of their company, doesn't mean they can do this kind of stuff. they're blaming digital cameras for their huge losses, when they simply should have seen it coming (incidentally, they just closed a film making factory in Melbourne citing the same reasons).

business models have to have some kind of foresight. i wonder if oil companies will start suing for lost revenue when people begin to adopt alternative fuels? my bet is that they will. just like the RIAA got all stroppy that people suddenly didn't need vast, top-heavy distro chains anymore.

progress happens. people shouldn't sue over it, they should grow the **** up and get a life. This is most true!

I have a friend who works in shop-fitting industry. Around 4 years ago he was amazed when he got involved with some large high street chains to re-model their stores to include "in-house" 1 hour photo processing. When he asked his clients why they wanted to spend millions on a "regressing" technology, he was told... "What do you know about anything... The public will never embrace digital technology in their masses"

Imagine his surprise when on "opening day" these same people took photographs of these stores with... you've guessed it, digital cameras!


Cheers

EDIT: It was announced today that Kodak will close their massive 25 year old purpose built photo-processing factory in Nottinghamshire, England, with the loss of around 350 jobs. And earlier this year Polaroid went bust... Yep film "is" on it's way out!

[Mug Funky]

haha! nice! you show me your kodak factory closure, i'll show you mine:

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,10793501%255E1702,00.html

there were over 600 jobs lost for this one.

the really shitty thing is that Kodak clearly couldn't manage the place properly - that factory had recieved tens of millions in taxpayer funded "boosts" over the years, and in spite of that it still goes under.

i know what film i'm not getting next time i want to shoot outside the capabilities of my canon g3 (great camera, but it sucks in low light, so i keep my very old pentax on standby).

[SeeMoreDigital]

The crazy thing is that many people still prefer to view their pictures on good quality paper.

For what ever the reason, generating your own prints onto good quality paper is hellishly expensive, so I find it rather bizarre that it's taken until now for companies like Kodak to offer an economical digital to paper printing service...

...jeez if they can't buy/manufacture inks and paper at the right price and turn a profit... who can!


Cheers

[Doobie]

Kodak took a body blow from Poloroid over patents a couple decades ago. They were forced to cease selling their popular instant cameras and to buy back the cameras that they had sold.

"The company over the past several years has been issuing licenses, filing lawsuits, forming spinoff companies and finding other uses for its technologies." Getting rich off of litigation, an increasingly popular business model. But, not very productive. It's also to be expected when most congressmen are lawyers, a profession based on making money from litigation.

What seems to be common in many of these huge patent lawsuits is that the the company doing the suing didn't file the patent in the first place, but instead bought it from someone else. In this case, Kodak bought three patents from WANG's software division. This is another business model, searching for patents to buy for the basis of lawsuits. This is the kind of thing that really should be nipped by Congress (e.g. a patent award may never be greater than the amount of money spent to buy a patent).

[neo75903]

... and lawyers are the winners in this game.
Hope some somekind of solution will come on time before the whole industry is f****d up.

Kodak should have seen the digital revolution coming on and focuses it's business model on it. Adapt or be analieted. bit crue, but hey it is business :)

[dragongodz]

hmm a couple of interesting things in that article aswell
The jury decided in Rochester
Rochester's largest employer claimed
hmm so kodak is the largest employer in Rochester.....where the trial took place...is that right ? :sly:

The patents describe a method by which a program can "ask for help" from another application to carry out certain computer-oriented functions. That's generally similar to the way Java operates, according to Kodak and other experts.
hang on. "generally similar" ? you mean it only hase to be "generally similar" ? shit look for a thousand more of these cases then because a lot of programs do a "generally similar" thing to that.

see now that is a great example of a very broad patent which is going to hurt the evolution of programs etc and just line kodaks pockets.

[neo75903]

idd the patent can be applied very broad few examples i can come up with:
- Browser plugin, Flash, java, ActiveX, ...
- Windows Object Linking and Embedding
- Any Object Oriented Prgramming language, the where an object calls another to do things. Not so sure about DLLs but object oriented sounds very obvious.
- Server Apps that uses an runtime to perform tasks like php, jsp, asp, ... which all call an external runtime todo things. Except an server written in the language itself like Apache's tomcat which is written in java, but then point 3 is still valid.

So basically everythings that is written with an call to something else can be applied.
Wow imagine Kodak wins (which i doubt) over the whole line, we will end up with a giant Windows.exe file, maybe it is time for M$ to start making windows more compact :).

[neo75903]

Sun and Kodak have come to an agreement for ahuem Sun's infrigment by paying $92 milllion.
From idealistic point of view, this is not so good. But at Sun's point of view this can damage java image and slow down java acceptance.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3418931