Posted by
Steve Smith on
Apr 19, 2013; 6:46pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/digital-ethics-tp7582823p7582857.html
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 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). Arun Gershun lined it out pretty well in
1936 with a classic paper where the term "Light Field" was
coined. Levoy and
others at Stanford carried much of this forward in more practical
settings with former students like 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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