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But if you had a raw image from a camera with a bayer pattern, and you were tasked to compress it, anyone with decent knowledge about compression and the technology they're working with should be able to come up with compressing before de-bayering. Is something really patentable just because it applies to non-mainstream technology?

From the sounds of it, the patent literally seems to be about... compressing the data you get off of the image sensor. And that's it. Or are there important details I'm missing?

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> But if you had a raw image from a camera with a bayer pattern, and you were tasked to compress it, anyone with decent knowledge about compression and the technology they're working with should be able to come up with compressing before de-bayering. Is something really patentable just because it applies to non-mainstream technology?

Actually this exact reasoning is textbook grounds for rejecting a patent application. If a “person having ordinary skill in the art” would trivially come up with the claimed invention, a patent application can be rejected without a reference of prior art by citing obviousness of the invention. If what you’re saying is true, the examiner that originally granted the parent was probably not familiar with the subject matter(which is common).

Source: was a patent examiner a good while back

Yes that's the theory, but in practice patent offices massively err on the side of "eh it's probably novel, we'll let the courts sort it out later, oh and by the way here's our fee".

Absolutely. Well, first "let me issue a vague rejection and force a slight amendment to show due diligence, then issue an allowance on the amended claims". And then let the courts sort it out, as you said.

A lot of great inventions can seem obvious in retrospect once it's been explained to you, so it's a tricky razor to apply.

Perhaps, but this line is more often used to pretend that obvious inventions are more novel than they really are.

While I intuitively agree with you, how do you tell?

And more importantly, how do you tell in the limited time window the patent examiner has ([1] claims it's as low as 19 hours.)

edit: [2] has a more in-depth look at the problem

[1] https://www.oecd.org/site/stipatents/5_4_Frakes_Wasserman.pd... - "on average, an examiner spends only nineteen hours reviewing an application, including reading the patent application, searching for prior art, comparing the prior art with the patent application, writing a rejection, responding to the patent applicant’s arguments, and often conducting an interview with the applicant’s attorney"

[2] https://www.patentprogress.org/2018/03/06/granted-19-hours/

The problem is that, as you say, examiners usually lack ordinary skill in the art. Judges likewise. And there is never a shortage of "experts" who will testify (for a fee, of course) to how hard this was in retrospect.

I see a lot of people say that software shouldn't be patentable, but I actually think the real problem is the "ordinary skill in the art" test seems to be entirely broken / almost absent in that domain.

A lot of high value software patents seem to be things that would be in the realm of a solid candidate to come up with on the spot in a 30 minute interview for a programming job, and not because the technique is "known". Compressing individual channels is definitely something that sounds in the realm of good intern candidate to be able to come up with the idea on the spot in an interview.

So the problem isn't really software parents intrinsically, it's that they are so absurdly out of line with the "invention costs" such that "something an average programming intern would be able to come up with independently has a high chance of actually being patented". If the parents were only actually for "nonobvious to someone who hasn't been exposed to it before" things then they wouldn't really be a problem.

It's not either/or but rather both. Software (like all other math) shouldn't be patentable, and the "ordinary skill in the art" test is entirely broken / almost absent in that domain.

Sure the idea of compressing before de-bayering might be obvious. I'm not so sure the actual technique for doing the compression in a manner that also made it easy to de-compress while de-bayering is quite so obvious.

It probably took quite a bit of experimentation to come up with a number of different ways of separating the colours and compressing the individual colours, and identifying the approach that played best with the de-bayering process. So the basic "compress before de-bayering" idea might not be patentable, but the actual algorithm and specific approach(s) sounds reasonably difficult to refine, and thus patentable.

My understanding is that all lossless on-camera raw compression is patent encumbered, and so companies use fancy proprietary mostly-lossless compression eg. blackmagic raw.

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