RED Sue Sony, Sony hits back and Jim Jannard talks about RED’s recent brush with ARRI and the Michael Bravin court case.
From Sony via their Show-highend website:
Sony Comments re Patent Suit Filed By Red Digital Cinema
On February 12, 2013, Red Digital Cinema (“Red”) sued Sony Corporation of America and Sony Electronics Inc. and alleged that the Sony PMW-F5, PMW-F55, and F65 digital cinema cameras infringe two Red patents. The F65 has been commercially available for over a year and the F5 and F55 were announced in October, 2012.
Sony has now had an opportunity to study Red’s complaint and the asserted patents, and categorically denies Red’s allegations. Sony intends to defend itself vigorously in the Red lawsuit. Sony looks forward to prevailing in court, thus vindicating the Sony engineers who developed Sony’s quality digital cinema cameras.
RED’s Jim Jannard on the Sony patent lawsuit:
We have taken a bit of flak for filing a lawsuit against Sony Electronics.
#1. Sony stepped up and finally supported 4K from cameras to displays. That is helping to cement 4K as the real cinema standard. Good. We actually have a Sony 4K 84″ display and Sony 4K projector at RSH for reference.
But…
#2. We are heavily invested in concepts, inventions, designs, development and manufacturing of RED cameras, REDRAY and the RED Projector. Each is unique and has motivated the industry to get better, for the benefit of all. We don’t mind others joining the 4K revolution… quite the contrary, we embrace it. What we don’t accept is others just borrowing our technology, intentionally or unintentionally. We admire invention and happily pay for and license great technology from other companies when it is useful to our program.
#3. We have created many jobs in the US leveraging our vision and technology and we will aggressively protect our employees. Every single job matters. It is a magic trick to build a camera in the US, especially at the highest level. This cannot be done if others are allowed to just take what we have done and use our work as their own.
#4. Our customers have invested in our technology. They need to be protected and their investment needs to be protected. We have an obligation to our customers so they will not have their investment diluted by a proliferation of the proprietary technology they invested in.
We don’t mean to be heavy handed. We saw 4K as the future standard in 2005. We have endured comments that “RED was a scam”. “1080P was good enough.” “What does a sunglass guy know about cameras?”… as well as others I would never publish.
Patents are here for a reason. They protect IP. Receiving a patent now means that you have an obligation to protect it… or they have absolutely no value whatsoever.
We are anxious to resolve this and have everyone move along. But in the end… our ideas, employees and customers matter. We will tenaciously protect all of them.
Jim
More from Jim about the Sony patent case HERE.
Jim on his Recon post about RED’s case against ARRI and Michael Bravin:
It is true that RED settled the case with Arri and Michael Bravin. We’ve had a barrage of inquiries and unfortunately we cannot give you all the details because we have a confidential settlement, but … I can say this. We are very happy with the terms of the settlement with Arri and glad to have this behind us. It’s now time for everyone to move on and concentrate on the future.
I also know that the case between Band Pro and Arri is not settled yet. Hopefully they will settle in a way that Band Pro is as happy as we are.
Jim
Quotes courtesy of Reduser.com RECON and Sony Show-highend.