Roger -
What you're seeing is a new piece of common law being established.
If a trademark holder does not defend a trademark by action in the
marketplace, it loses it.
If a patent holder does not market a patented drug which could save
lives, it loses the patent.
If a publisher fails to make its copyrighted works available, it loses
the copyright.
These virtual property rights do not include the right to hoard, you
have to exercise the right if you want to keep it.
Continuing to beat pedantically on the bloated rib cage of the dead
horse (Carl, wanna join in, it's not Taiko but it *is* exciting!)...
I am in the midst of a project with an individual/small company who
holds patents in omnistereoscopic capture. The guy had an idea 20
years ago or so that wasn't really that unique, but required some vision
to realize that what was impossible in 1995 might be doable in 2005 and
nearly easy and useful in 2015. This is vaguely coming to pass. Maybe.
</details of the tech pushed to the bottom for convenience of those
interested only in the ethics aspect, not the tech/>
So, I'm working *with the man* because I know I can't work against him
(easily). I want to spend my time and $$ on the implementation and
application, not a legal patent challenge). I am designing a better
*implementation* of the ideas presented in the patent disclosures and
subsequent white papers, etc. And why should I? Why should we not work
together? They have already spent hundreds of thousands (sadly, mostly
on patent attorneys?). A rising tide lifts all ships. etc. (but what
does a tsunami do?)
Well, there are lots of answers to this, and none are easy. In many
cases, the patent holder would patently(pun) NOT be interested in
cooperating with me. In this case, my agenda and his/theirs seems
aligned. We have NDAs in place and hopefully soon solid MOUs and
eventually *contracts*. I see the patents in this case *helping* me.
If I can nail the implementation well, it is in the patent holder's
interest to use my implementation and for others who want to do what we
are doing to use my implementation and their patents. But there will
be yet others who want to roll their own, possibly "borrow" my work to
smooth the path, etc. Where will my sympathies lie then?
But I feel a little cheap and dirty too. Why can't anyone with the
wherefore, glue up 100 cameras or so pointing in all directions at once
and mathemagically blend/stitch/warp/shuffle/spindle/fold all those
pixels into a high resolution, rectified stereo 360 movie on the fly?
Why do they have to say "mother may I" to anyone? Because someone had
the money to buy a patent? Because I'm investing a lot into trying to
solve this problem well and don't want to be scooped? Or for my
"competition" to unfairly exploit *my* work against me?
At some point in this process I expect to trip over *someone else's*
Patents which will be very distracting. I'm not applying for any
patents, though I do mark my code with copyright notices and I do mark
my drawings "Business Confidential" and I do give some care to who I
give how many details to (nothing here worth a hoot really).
/<anecdotal aside about a patent from Sandia/Musetech that offended
me moved to the end as well>/
Time to hitch the dead horse to the back of my Kubota and drag it down
to the bosque for the rest of the scavengers to have their way with.
Thanks for letting me vent my own frustration/confusion (like the gas
buildup in the belly of the dead horse I am beating?)... about the
changes we are in the midst of... it is truly the best of times and the
worst of times I suppose.
When I left LANL 5 years ago, this problem was verging on too hard for
the likes of me (with much better backing (which of course evaporated)
than now!)... now it appears it will be doable in the next year or
two? Moore's law and the whole cohort of corollaries to it and all!
- Steve
Tech details
The 3D movie industry and the 3D gaming and to a lesser extent TV
industry has brought affordable, reasonably good Stereoscopy to the
consumer market. Planetaria are going digital. Ambient Computing
(nod to Guerin, Smith, et al) is coming up from the bottom. High
resolution, high speed, high dynamic range digital cameras are
becoming affordable (Point Grey Flea3/Blackfly, etc.).
So now their patents are actionable and there may be a market for
the results. Like all patents, I'm mildly offended by the
"obviousness" of it all. In this case, it is essentially a set of
expositions of the "obvious" ways to sample the plenoptic function
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field#The_5D_plenoptic_function>
efficiently and with as few of artifacts as possible.
A 10th century arabic mathematician seems to be the first to have
mentioned these basic concepts, with Da Vinci, Bacon, Faraday and
others weighing in pretty insightfully up until computers and
digital imaging devices made it (almost) practical to start doing
such sampling (Adelson & Bergen
<http://persci.mit.edu/pub_pdfs/elements91.pdf>). Arun Gershun
lined it out pretty well in 1936 with a classic paper where the term
"Light Field" was coined. Levoy
<http://graphics.stanford.edu/%7Elevoy/>and others at Stanford
carried much of this forward in more practical settings with former
students like Ren Ng <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_Ng> firing up
startups like Lytro that got everyone wound up a few years ago.
Anecdotal aside about dumb patents...
In the VR world, the butt of many derisive jokes is when Creve
Maples of Sandia and then MuseTech patented the notion of
"navigating in a virtual world using a craft".
The whole community snorted loudly and in unison. Many changed the
variable names and documentation of their systems to refer to a
"Vessel" to avoid being in violation of using a "Craft" and
proceeded, most were not commercial and probably never going to be a
target of a patent infringement suit anyway, but still! I prefer
the "Teutonic" pronunciation of "Wessel!" just to put an extra
degree of indirection between me and the "Craft" patent.
Will the native student at IAIA who is building a first person
experience of paddling a canoe in rice fields in the great lakes
area going to have to pay royalties to MuseTech (or Sandia?) if it
goes beyond a student project? Geeze?!
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