Scribbling On Digital Photos 134
JagsLive notes a patent application filed in the US by Nokia for a way to 'scribble on the back' of digital photos. Nokia's approach is similar to the iPod's Cover Flow, except that Nokia users will be able to flip through their snaps, select one, and then turn it over and annotate the back just using SMS-like text entry. The scribble becomes an integral part of the saved photo.
Exif? Flip? Software Patents Suck. (Score:1, Insightful)
An integral part of the photo, like Exif? Why didn't I think of that?
Perhaps they are patenting the GUI flip? No one has done that before, except a GUI for every OS years ago.
I know, it's a patent for a computer system that does all of the above! Brillian1.
Someone please end software patents.
Wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought we were past that (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, I thought we were past the days of "well established process" + "the internet" or + "a computer" = brand new shiny patent.
Clearly the patent office hasn't learned anything, and apparently we have yet to exhaust the pool of basic processes that can be "reinvented" for a computer. Sad.
Already exists. (Score:5, Insightful)
This already exists as EXIF comments in the jpegs. I can add these remarks and sort them using the comments in most modern photo viewing programs.
The only "innovation" I can see here is the fact it makes a nice animation flipping the photo over. Hardly patent-worthy.
Seriously, we need to have people that grant patents with some experience in the field they're granting patents.
Re:Just checking... what's the primary anger here? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a third -
This is bad because it's trivial.
Utterly trivial. The combination of something obvious (annotating pictures, been done since photography came around) and combining it with a little gui flip-trick. FUCKING WOW. I'M IMPRESSED.
This is just dumb.
Re:I thought we were past that (Score:2, Insightful)
Similar to all the totally unbelievable scams you get in email today. You ask yourself if anyone is dumb enough to fall for that.
Usually the answer is no. But someone was dumb enough to fall for a different scam but this is a shoddy imitation of it.
I also love how all of them mention God like 8*10^32 times because they think we're all religious wackos in America (to be fair, statistically...)
Re:Exif? Flip? Software Patents Suck. (Score:4, Insightful)
the future, is YEARS AGO!
Fixed that for you. :)
Re:Just checking... what's the primary anger here? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nokia probably don't care if they get this or not (Score:4, Insightful)
Nokia obviously want to use this feature in their software, and don't want to be sued. Nobody else has staked out a claim for this particular concept, so Nokia filed a patent. If it's granted, Nokia get to use this feature and can claim a little bit of money from anyone else who chooses to do so. If it's knocked back on the grounds that it's obvious or that there's prior art and it's therefore unpatentable, then Nokia still get to use that feature without the risk of being sued. They win either way.
Re:Just checking... what's the primary anger here? (Score:5, Insightful)
i think you're missing the point.
any moderately intelligent computer user sees how absurd this patent is because this is a trivial and non-innovative function. it's like patenting a drop down menu, 1-click checkout, or a pop-up window.
patents were legally established to encourage innovation in a way that rewards inventors but would ultimately serve the public good. that is why they were designed to give inventors a financial incentives to provide ingenious solutions to complex problems, which would then be released into the public domain after the patent expired. and in this way, the patent system would nurture the spirit of innovation and grow the public corpus of technological knowledge.
you can't claim a patent on self-apparent software features because they are obvious to any programmer who is looking to solve the same problem and thus do not qualify as personal inventions. whether it there is prior art plays no importance in this issue.
if it's an obvious feature, and it's a common problem, then of course there will be prior art. but that's an incidental result. a patent for an obvious solution to a trivial but uncommon problem would be equally invalid regardless of whether there is prior art or not. so it has neither to do with prior art nor any fundamental issue against software patents.
patents as these contribute nothing to society, nor do they add anything of value to the public corpus of human knowledge shared by our society.
Re:Exif? Flip? Software Patents Suck. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly what I was thinking. Oh, and of course, I was also thinking that the place to do this is on REAL CAMERAS, not crappy cell phone cameras. Have a touch screen on the back of your DSLR and write with a stylus. That would actually be useful. This is a complete and utter waste of the patent office's time and energy.
Basically, this is a beautiful, easy-to-understand example of why software patents are inherently wrong. First, it ensures that a potentially useful technology will only be available on the most utterly useless hardware. Second, it stifles further innovation in this area and harms the market as a whole by producing a host of competing standards that will not be interoperable. Third, it harms the public good by denying them access to what appears to be nothing more than a trivial lipstick-on-a-pig treatment to the EXIF comment tag because most people are locked into their phones and couldn't switch to Nokia even if they wanted to. Finally, it guarantees that few peope will bother to use the technology even on Nokia handsets because the people they send the photos to won't be able to decode the notes....
Repeat after me: Thou shalt not patent thine file formats, nor thine XML dialects, nor thine EXIF tags.
Re:You know, I am usually a big defender of IP (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to agree, software patents seem to always be bad. (Perhaps 1% of them are valid, but that doesn't excuse the 99% that are junk.) If we were forced to keep software patents, though, maybe companies should be forced to choose between copyright and patent. You can choose a patent on how your software works, but that patent expires in a relatively short period of time (say, 5 years for a software patent) and can be overturned in court. After the patent expires/is overturned, your software is effectively Public Domain. Or you can choose copyright on your software and get the longer protection span, but not the "width" of protection (as your protection is only on your implementation of the software concept, not the software concept itself). To grant both copyright *and* patent protections on the same piece of software is just idiotic.