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Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Fujifilm Patent On Converting To Greyscale

One of the most protracted lawsuits concerning smartphone patents has concluded. The case was brought by Fujifilm against Motorola for infringing its patents in mobile phones. The jury brought in a mixed verdict, rejecting three of the patent claims relating to face detection and WiFi/Bluetooth. But one of the patents was deemed valid and Motorola was ordered to pay $10 million. This isn't much of a victory for Fujifilm as they asked for $40 million and probably won't make a profit on the award after the lawyers have been paid. This might be a timely warning to any company thinking of entering the patent wars, but it is also worth looking at the patent that Fujifilm used to get $10 million out of Motorola.

Those skilled in the art almost certainly knew how to convert an RGB image into greyscale long before the patent.

There are lots of silly patents on the obvious in photography and computational photography but not that many that get $10 million awarded on their strength.

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