KernelSlanders posted:Is there some authority on what "about" means in reference to ISO settings and f-stops, or in these super precise version of a common thing patents generally? It is context specific and depends on what a person of ordinary skill would conclude is "about" the setting claimed in light of the specification. In this case this is in the disclosure: "In embodiments of the disclosure, terms such as "about," "approximately," and "substantially" can include traditional rounding according to significant figures of the numerical value." Someone from the dorkroom would be better able to answer but I think f-numbers and ISO values are pretty standardized. So some hypothetical crazy lens with a setting at an f-stop of 5.6452 would be "about" 5.6, but one set at f-4 or f-8 would not be.
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# ? May 9, 2014 14:25 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 10:10 |
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Shifty Pony posted:Someone from the dorkroom would be better able to answer but I think f-numbers and ISO values are pretty standardized. So some hypothetical crazy lens with a setting at an f-stop of 5.6452 would be "about" 5.6, but one set at f-4 or f-8 would not be. The entire point of ISO is to standardize things. Like ISO 3103.
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# ? May 9, 2014 15:46 |
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hobbesmaster posted:Like, that patent is so narrow you might have trouble violating it intentionally. Also, I can't imagine how you could file a complaint with a judge and claim, with a straight face, that you meet the Rule 11 bar for filing without having photos of their studio setup. It's practically unenforceable even if someone did violate it.
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# ? May 9, 2014 19:13 |
ayn rand hand job posted:The entire point of ISO is to standardize things. Like ISO 3103. I know the values are arrived at in a set way I just didn't know or feel like digging into the standard to find out if vales such as 322 or the like are allowed or it just rounded to the nearest 10.
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# ? May 9, 2014 19:20 |
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Shifty Pony posted:I know the values are arrived at in a set way I just didn't know or feel like digging into the standard to find out if vales such as 322 or the like are allowed or it just rounded to the nearest 10. 322 rounded to the nearest significant figure is 320?
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# ? May 9, 2014 19:29 |
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Kalman posted:Also, I can't imagine how you could file a complaint with a judge and claim, with a straight face, that you meet the Rule 11 bar for filing without having photos of their studio setup. It's practically unenforceable even if someone did violate it. What advantage is it for Amazon to have a patent like that? Like, why even spend the time and money to file it?
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# ? May 9, 2014 20:10 |
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wateroverfire posted:What advantage is it for Amazon to have a patent like that? Like, why even spend the time and money to file it? In house patent attorneys and engineers whose performance is partially based on the number of patents they get is my guess.
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# ? May 9, 2014 20:12 |
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wateroverfire posted:What advantage is it for Amazon to have a patent like that? Like, why even spend the time and money to file it? I suspect that it's likely their product photography setup. More than likely it would be a CYA for legal reasons.
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# ? May 9, 2014 20:16 |
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wateroverfire posted:What advantage is it for Amazon to have a patent like that? Like, why even spend the time and money to file it? Possibly making sure that Amazon photographers don't leave for a different employer, but continue to use the same methods that they learned at Amazon.
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# ? May 9, 2014 20:18 |
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Shifty Pony posted:It is context specific and depends on what a person of ordinary skill would conclude is "about" the setting claimed in light of the specification. In this case this is in the disclosure: "In embodiments of the disclosure, terms such as "about," "approximately," and "substantially" can include traditional rounding according to significant figures of the numerical value." Shifty Pony posted:I know the values are arrived at in a set way I just didn't know or feel like digging into the standard to find out if vales such as 322 or the like are allowed or it just rounded to the nearest 10. WhiskeyJuvenile posted:322 rounded to the nearest significant figure is 320? F-numbers and ISO are relatively standardized. Both of them are logarithmic-type scales. A "unit" on these scales represents a doubling or halving of the intensity of the light (f-stop) or the sensitivity of the sensor (ISO), and is colloquially referred to as a "stop" ("I opened up the aperture one stop and turned the ISO down one stop"). The usual scale for ISO uses a base number of ISO 100. So then you have 200, 400, 800, 1600, etc, or 50, 25, etc. Because it's a log scale, half or third stop changes have strange units. ISO320 is ISO200 + 2/3 stop or ISO400 - 1/3 stop. I'd say that's probably a "normal" setting for studio work, where you're using lots of artificial illumination, except in one respect. Most cameras offer an ISO setting that is adjusted in half or third stops like that, but it's not the most efficient way to use the camera. Making a digital image is a three step process. First, the camera reads out the image from the CCD sensor. The CCD signal goes through an analog amplifier, which has a selectable gain. The higher the gain, the more sensitive the sensor is (higher ISO) but the noise in the signal is also amplified, so it gets grainier and you start losing color precision ("bits of color depth"). Second, this signal is converted from electrical values into digital values by an analog-to-digital converter. Most cameras are based on what's called a Bayer filter - the pixels are covered by a mosaic grid of R,G,B filters which record the intensity of light for one color at one pixel as a 24-bit B+W value. Finally, the image is then read into an onboard image processor, which takes the monochrome values from adjacent pixels (representing one R,G,B channel each) and convolves them into 8-bit R,G,B values at each pixel. However it can only work with what it's given, if there's noise in the signal read into the processor, the processor can try to fix it but it can't eliminate it after the fact. The thing is that the analog amplifier only works in whole stops from the base ISO setting (usually 100). So the way the camera gets things like ISO 320 is to turn the analog image amplifier up to ISO 400 and then subtract 1/3 of the intensity from all three channels. You're increasing the amount of noise in the image and throwing away some of the information in the image. Smart photographers only use the whole ISO stops, so it's interesting that they picked 320 instead of 200 or 400. However, the difference in practical terms is zero, particularly in a studio where you can easily adjust the intensity of your lighting. Either 200 or 400 would be "about ISO 320" to a photographer, which is why I suspect they picked that - they can cover both bases, which is dead center of where you would put that setting for studio work. Either 200 or 400 is about right. 800 is pretty high, 100 is a bit on the low side for studio work. The f-stop scale does not have nice even units, but it works in the same way. The scale goes like: f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, etc, those are the "whole units" typically used today (not always historically). There's three competing concerns to selecting an f-stop. The first is the amount of light - the lower the f-number, the brighter the image projected onto the sensor. This isn't really a problem under studio lighting. Second, depth of field - the lower the number, the less that can be in focus at one time. This is a big concern with product photography and other macro-like work - when you get up close, the depth of field gets really shallow, so you don't want to use low f-stop numbers. Finally, the diffraction limit - stopping down makes the lens sharper but it increases the amount of interaction between beams of light, causing increased additive/cancellation effects which reduce the resolution past a certain point. That link is the best technical explanation I've found, but the numbers are out of date, modern sensors have more megapixels and run into that limit quicker. f/5.6 happens to be the exact number where the diffraction limit kicks in with modern sensors. No photographer would use an aperture lower than f/4 or so for product photography - there's just too little in focus up close at f/2.8 and some macro lenses don't even go that low. And at f/11 and higher you're really starting to lose a measurable amount of resolution. That means that there's an ideal range of about f/4-f/8 for this kind of stuff, and one f-stop difference is "about f/5.6" to a photographer. So again they've staked out the exact middle of the reasonable working range with those ambiguous "about" claims. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 22:01 on May 9, 2014 |
# ? May 9, 2014 21:33 |
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Given that a camera actually operates differently at ISO 320 versus ISO 200 and 400, decent argument that they don't fall within "about" and certainly don't fall into equivalents. Same for f-stop. Especially since, now that I've read the disclosure, they basically say "about means normal rounding." The claims also lack written description to support interpretations of "about" to mean anything other than the value plus or minus the normal tolerance you'd expect in a optical electromechanical system, which means that constructions of the claims that included those interpretations are disfavored. Basically, it's not something they could effectively use against anyone.
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# ? May 9, 2014 21:43 |
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Kalman posted:Given that a camera actually operates differently at ISO 320 versus ISO 200 and 400, decent argument that they don't fall within "about" and certainly don't fall into equivalents. Same for f-stop. Especially since, now that I've read the disclosure, they basically say "about means normal rounding." That's kind of like saying that a claim that involves driving a car at "about 47 miles per hour" wouldn't cover driving a car at 45 miles an hour or 50 miles per hour because at those settings the high-speed/low-speed jets in the carb are injecting different amounts of fuel and that means the car is operating differently. That's a tiny nuanced internal detail that most photographers probably don't even know about. You usually have to dig through menus to turn half-stop and third-stop ISO settings off, if it can be done at all. The camera always adjusts the image in the image processor to at least some degree anyway, so this kind of nuance is basically subsumed by the normal process of how the camera converts the RAW file (the digitized signal) to a image (eg JPG). To go back to the car example above, the precise details of how the carb operates would be significant if we were dealing with a patent for a new carb, but it's insignificant to the act of driving the car, which is what is claimed. This isn't a patent on a novel method of capturing a photo, it's a patent on taking a photo composed like this, and the precise combination of manipulations the image processor applies in the course of taking the photo is irrelevant. Let's say we take the patent on photo composition and we use all their listed settings as described in the patent, except instead we use a camera with a Foveon sensor (which lack the Bayer filters and thus "operate differently" under your metric). I'm 100% sure the patent would stand in that case. The same as if the car in the example above was fuel injected instead of carburated. In fact, every camera implements the above digitization process slightly differently, so unless they include a laundry list of every camera ever made then the process is guaranteed to be "different" in the sense you're using. Analogously, should patents involving cars have to include a laundry list of specific models, because car A has jets that are 2mm in diameter and car B has 2.4mm in diameter, and car C has differently sized wheels, and so on? That's clearly absurd. Sometimes the process varies down to the firmware version installed on the camera, and the mess would get even deeper if we included third-party tools that can process the RAW off-camera, like Aperture or Lightroom. The precise technical implementation of how control signals are implemented is just not relevant when the claim is a particular combination of control signals. To the end user, ISO 320 is ISO 320 no matter which digital camera is in their hands. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 23:09 on May 9, 2014 |
# ? May 9, 2014 22:18 |
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Paul MaudDib posted:The precise technical implementation of how control signals are implemented is just not relevant when the claim is a particular combination of control signals. To the end user, ISO 320 is ISO 320 no matter which camera is in their hands. I do this for a living, you realize. The precise details do matter. As to the meaning of about, as others have said, it's contextual - in the car example it might or might not cover 45 vs 47 vs 50. But here, the spec explains what "about" means, as in, it includes rounding so about ISO 320 probably covers ISO 315 to ISO 325 and might extend to 310-330 depending on the math involved. But it doesn't cover ISO 200 or ISO 400 under the literal meaning of the words of the claim. So why do details matter? It's called the doctrine of equivalents - the way in which something is implemented ( not the way the end user understands it) actually matters when the literal language doesn't cover it. Yes, ISO 320 is ISO 320, but ISO 200 is not equivalent to "about ISO 320" because it doesn't pass the function-way-result test; arguably a different result, but you've just explained that ISO 320 is achieved in a different way from ISO 200 in that one is directly recorded while the other is achieved via processing.
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# ? May 9, 2014 23:02 |
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Kalman posted:Yes, ISO 320 is ISO 320, but ISO 200 is not equivalent to "about ISO 320" because it doesn't pass the function-way-result test; arguably a different result, but you've just explained that ISO 320 is achieved in a different way from ISO 200 in that one is directly recorded while the other is achieved via processing. ISO 200 is also achieved by processing. You're looking at a picture in RGB color, not electrical charge levels in monochrome. If you're going to make that distinction, the distinction has to be that the processing is different, not that no processing is done at ISO 200, because it is. And that really opens up a huge can of worms because no two firmware versions, let alone two different cameras, do that processing quite the same. No two workflows do that processing quite the same either - you're saying that literally every setting from the camera to the gamma and color profile on the user's monitor would have to be the same and that's impossible and absurd. The better point to dismiss an infringement suit on would be the very specific claims of lighting and camera, but I have a sneaking suspicion they opened up a basic photography book and tried to patent the layout pictures. Sounds like more or less every studio softbox setup. Those top and side panels are all there to be used to diffuse a light source, and the same arrangement is commonly scaled up for larger stuff. That's pretty much what the claim is regarding the composition. e: here's another one that is also pretty close https://www.flickr.com/photos/rapturedmind/5446909504/in/photostream/ That arrangement is really obvious and common and pretty much every photographer has played with a DIY softbox like the one above. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 23:25 on May 9, 2014 |
# ? May 9, 2014 23:09 |
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Claim isn't to "at least 85mm lens", the light sources have more specific positioning, etc etc etc. Read the claims carefully, like a lawyer would, before you whine about them covering everything under the sun. Also, diffusers aren't going to be light sources under the claim and spec - each source has to be a separate emitter. And yes, the details of which firmware processes what in what way matter. Patentees draft their claims broadly to avoid exactly these issues - because equivalents can be hard to show, so you want to get literal scope that covers things. The picture you posted might meet the "camera" claim element, but that's probably about it.
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# ? May 9, 2014 23:25 |
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Kalman posted:The picture you posted might meet the "camera" claim element, but that's probably about it. Camera, background, light placement, elevated platform, etc. It's pretty close really. e: Some of that guy's other stuff is actually even closer. This actually may be a dead-on match for the patent. The lens listed on the photo is just for taking pictures of the setup - you'd use a longer lens to actually photograph the object. https://www.flickr.com/photos/rapturedmind/5536144990/ quote:1. A studio arrangement, comprising: We have
quote:SB-80dx (Diffusor - 1/8) into 28" Westcott Apollo Softbox from the top as mainlight, SB-80dx (24mm - 1/32) bare and flagged towards camera and background as rim from the right, SB-80dx (24mm - 1/32) bare and flagged towards camera and background as rim from the left, SB-80dx (14mm - 1/8) bare on background with 2 green gels, camera and flashes tiggered via PocketWizard Plus II and optical trigger. Yep that's the setup all right. I guess he may have put his tripods in slightly different places but that's the same lighting arrangement. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 23:41 on May 9, 2014 |
# ? May 9, 2014 23:26 |
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Paul MaudDib posted:Camera, background, light placement, elevated platform, etc. It's pretty close really. "Pretty close" doesn't matter in patents.
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# ? May 9, 2014 23:28 |
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Paul MaudDib posted:Camera, background, light placement, elevated platform, etc. It's pretty close really. Patent law is not horse shoes. They specify a very exacting lighting layout that those pictures do not meet.
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# ? May 9, 2014 23:31 |
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hobbesmaster posted:Patent law is not horse shoes. Yeah, the whole patent system is incredibly navel-gazing and that's really what's wrong with the whole thing. Frankly I really don't think a patent on a lighting arragement would possibly fail based on the fact that two cameras would capture an image slightly differently given the same control settings, but that's the kind of poo poo that patent lawyers spend their days arguing. I just wish the whole thing weren't so incredibly disruptive to the actual process of innovation and advancing the arts and sciences. I look at the way things like software patents have been weaponized and think that we'd be better off with substantially loosened intellectual property rights. Right now it mostly seems to be big companies filing mountains of patent applications for really obvious and uninteresting things and when a few inevitably slide through, no matter what the prior art (slide to unlock, etc), it becomes a weapon they can use to file SLAPP suits and run their competitors out of business. Much like the insane British legal system pre-reform, it's really not a good idea to have to be forced to pay a bunch of money to get a legal wizard to spin some crap that Amazon uses a Nikon D40 and I use a Canon 40D and that means their lighting arrangement patent no longer applies, just to use basic object photography arrangements that have been floating around for 50 years. The patent system is that level of broken. Patents like that shouldn't be granted but neither should arguing brands and models of image capture devices and lenses and literally firmware versions. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 09:28 on May 10, 2014 |
# ? May 9, 2014 23:49 |
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Paul MaudDib, why did you just list claim 1 of the patent instead of the entirety of claims 1-27?quote:Therefore, the following is claimed: I don't think you realize just how specific this patent is.
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# ? May 9, 2014 23:51 |
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karthun posted:Paul MaudDib, why did you just list claim 1 of the patent instead of the entirety of claims 1-27? Because that's what someone listed on the previous page. Actually Claim 2 is pretty much a dead ringer for that last setup I posted. quote:2. A studio arrangement, comprising: A "light shield" is commonly referred to as a flag. I'm pretty sure most any studio softbox setup can be covered by those claims. It's really fairly obvious how to go about taking a photo of an object against a white background without shadows, there's only so many ways to do it that don't involve having a stand in the photo or shooting a flash straight into your lens or whatnot. This one, by the way, doesn't even specify what the image capture device is. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 00:15 on May 10, 2014 |
# ? May 10, 2014 00:01 |
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Paul MaudDib posted:Because that's what someone listed on the previous page. Actually Claim 2 is pretty much a dead ringer for that last setup I posted. Thats just claim two, now what about the rest of the claims? Please show me how "any studio softbox setup can be covered by those claims." I cant wait until you realize that you need to infringe on ALL of the claims in order to infringe on the patent.
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# ? May 10, 2014 00:24 |
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karthun posted:Thats just claim two, now what about the rest of the claims? Please show me how "any studio softbox setup can be covered by those claims." I cant wait until you realize that you need to infringe on ALL of the claims in order to infringe on the patent. That's not how claims work. Claim 2 is independent, the rest of the claims after that are dependent. quote:There are two basic types of claims: quote:For infringement to exist, each element (or its equivalent under certain circumstances) of the claim must be present in the accused device or method. Although a patent may have many claims, only one claim need be infringed for the patent to be infringed. Glad I could clear that up for you. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 00:52 on May 10, 2014 |
# ? May 10, 2014 00:27 |
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Paul MaudDib posted:That's not how claims work. Claim 2 is independent, the rest of the claims after that are dependent. Guess you are right on that.
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# ? May 10, 2014 00:58 |
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Paul MaudDib posted:That's kind of like saying that a claim that involves driving a car at "about 47 miles per hour" wouldn't cover driving a car at 45 miles an hour or 50 miles per hour because at those settings the high-speed/low-speed jets in the carb are injecting different amounts of fuel and that means the car is operating differently.
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# ? May 10, 2014 01:45 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 10:10 |
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So, cls bank v alice corp. I'm not a US expert by any means (I work mostly on JP cases) but this decision reads like a mess, with very little that would seem to help lower courts or the uspt analyze even slightly more moderate claims. I honestly sympathize with that one federal circuit judge who wanted everything be valid under 101, and let 102/103 sort them out, as they undoubtedly would have for the alice corp patent.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 07:37 |