Kodak Getting More Patent Aggressive: In Legal Fight Over Photo Sharing Site

from the oh-come-on dept

Mon, Dec 20th 2010 7:36pm — Mike Masnick

About a year ago, we were disappointed to see Kodak start to sue mobile phone companies for patent infringement, wondering if this was a sign of trouble at the company. As we've seen in the past, when big companies start filing patent infringement lawsuits, it's a sign that they're having trouble innovating in the marketplace, so they switch to trying to use the law to hold back competitors. It seems that the company is taking things even further and has sued photo-hosting/sharing site Shutterfly. Years back, you may remember, Kodak bought a similar site, Ofoto, and apparently now it's claiming that only it is allowed to do some rather basic photos hosting site features, such as selling prints or photobooks from the site. Shutterfly has its own patents and has filed a countersuit -- which Kodak called a "litigation tactic." Yeah, it's a litigation tactic: responding to a silly patent lawsuit with a similar one. Problem is, Kodak is the company that kicked off this "litigation tactic."

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Filed Under: patents, photos, photosharing
Companies: kodak, shutterfly

9 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 20 Dec 2010 @ 8:16pm

They both infringed on each others patents. Lets just call it a wash and go home.
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Dec 2010 @ 8:27pm

Re:
That's the worst thing that could happen. Doing so would only provide ammunition for other sites that want to enter the marketplace. They would either need patents they could hold over Kodak's head, or shell out loads of money to keep Kodak afloat and ensure its own demise. If someone had received a 'patent' on uploading a picture when the internet was first started, it would've been stripped from them. A few million dollars to the corrupt congress and house, and they would get the keep the patent and force anyone wanting to upload a picture to pay out the butt to do so.

Best to declare nobody the winner, nullify the patents, and innovate. But that will never happen. Not in this life, nor in any other. Not while we have 'alleged' corruption in the White House and 'alleged' cowards for judges.
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Dec 2010 @ 11:35pm

Re: Re:
I guess my solution would be too logical and logic no longer an acceptable endeavor.
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Christopher (profile), 20 Dec 2010 @ 11:43pm

Re:
The patents shouldn't have been given in the damned first place. A lot of this stuff is 'prior art' or 'obvious to a person in the industry'.

For goodness sakes, this is nothing more than FTP hosting with a prettier interface and the ability to view your pictures when it comes down to it.
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Christopher (profile), 20 Dec 2010 @ 11:44pm

Re: Re: Re:
Your solution isn't logical, in that it assume that the patents are valid ones. From the viewpoint of most in the tech community, these kind of 'process patents' are not legitimate and do a lot of 'freezing out of the market' of competing services, which we should have more of and which would lower prices dramatically.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Dec 2010 @ 1:46am

Re: Re: Re:
Behold the troll-sniffing-rat.

http://hackaday.com/2010/12/19/hackaday-unleashes-a-troll-sniffing-rat/

Hi s eyes are going crazy right now.
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josslossboss, 21 Dec 2010 @ 4:18am

Kodak are just pissed that they didnt buy Flickr when they had the chance ('cause they are in the 'images' business not the camera business)....and now they they dont like any new media.
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abc gum, 21 Dec 2010 @ 4:20am

This reminds me of Forgent - lol
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Dec 2010 @ 9:15am

Re: Re:
I'm in no way defending our broken patent system.
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