ShaheedMalik wrote:What's stopping any other company from putting Jpeg 2000 in a Quicktime container and changing the header? Red sues them and can't they just easily prove the patent invalid?
Use of Jpeg2000 or QT container is not what is patented. RED basically patented an idea of RAW compression (with some pre-processing) even if it was known/used way before they done it and this is the problem.
They filed another patent recently which even further extends previous patent into all codec types, sensor types, all devices (including mobile phones), etc. This is pure CRAP.
This almost like getting patent for any compression for video data- try achieving this today
Companies get patents for specific math inside codecs, some novel, clever pre-processing etc. No one tries to patent compression idea itself. If RED at least was first with RAW compression- no one heard, talked about it and boom- they introduced it. Maybe this would make some sense, but this is FAAAAAAR from what they've done. As they done NOTHING new or inventive.
Patent should be about very specific new/unique "process/way of doing something".
In case of RED it could be a way of pre-processing RAW data before compression (which a lot of their patent is about), but even this was not new (Cineform and others used very similar methods). Whole RED patent story is pathetic and shows how much US patenting office is worth. Fact that RED is bunch of lawyers adds another layer. You don't have to invent anything- you just need to know how to trick government office to believe you did
RED also made some mistakes when it comes to things which can or can't happen before you apply for a patent (selling publicly products which use same technology), but looks like no one yet used this properly against RED.
RED did not just add some custom header- current files are encrypted, so you can't decode them without use of their SDK. This is the only company which does it this way! It locks you from writing better debayer, making hardware card etc. This is all done to have full control over ability to process RED files for different reasons including financial (sell of way overpriced Jpeg2000 decoders).
No long time ago (well - a year) they published improved debayering in their SDK. RED fanboys went crazy about it as results were much better. Problem is that they were better not because new method was great (it's just similar to Arri, BM own one etc.), but because old method was so poor. Thing is that only RED has access to RAW pixels, so only they could make it better and present like something "out of this world". This is how they operate. They make big shoot about nothing special. I think now people realised it, but for many years about all blindly believed them. Believed that RED is not Jpeg2000 based (but something unique out of this world), that their recording technology is a result of 100MLN$ and hours of R&D (where in reality it's just use of selected of the shelve disks), etc, etc.
They deserve to be mentioned for been 'brave' and push for something new (4K), when other/big companies had very 'slow' approach to it. Rest is done in very bad way which included threatening people with court, banning from their forum etc.