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Comment by ryandamm | Hacker News Reader

Red isn't a consumer company. How are they anti-consumer?

I'm not defending their IP practices, but this is not as stupid as it seems. Nikon knew about the patents when they designed their cameras. The patents were not dumb in 2007-2008.

Claims like the one excerpted are part of larger claim sets; if any claim gets invalidated, the rest that rely on it are useless. For the sake of being explicit, but also robust, lawyers will take a technical description and devolve it into a series of nested claims. Those individual claims, in isolation, sound dumb. But they're usually contingent on earlier claims that might reveal the novelty.

(I have not read the patent.)

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RED have some very nice people.

However, the product was/is okay-ishm but the fan boys are utterly toxic pricks.

the charged for everything, made special names for all sorts, and had tesla levels of bullshit when it came to deadlines and capabilities.

For example, the "RED ray" laser projector, which supposedly was a 4k native laser based projector, except that it wasn't, never ran at 4k during NAB and if I recall correctly at some point was replaced by a barco. (https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/126579-red-ray-4k-ci...)

They made "redrockets" that were supposedly super high tech decoding cards, but were in reality rebadged from another company. They were extra ordinarily fragile (I personally accidentally killed 3 in just one event) and fucking expensive (£4k each)

It was me, apparently that was the problem, not the design. In the same event I replaced graphics cards, a boat load of Fusion IoDrives, none of them died.

So yes, they were anti-consumer to a certain extent. However if they liked you, they'd invite you to the ranch, you'd hang out with other RED people and generally have a good time.

Don't forget about "REDmags", which are bog-standard off-the-shelf mSATA-SSDs sold at a markup so high it would make Apple execs blush.

Yeah this is all accurate... there is a lot of marketing at that company, which is unsurprising given that it was founded by Jim Jannard, who made his money selling consumer fashion goods at Oakley.

> Red isn't a consumer company. How are they anti-consumer?

Really?

I think you know like everyone else here what consumer means in this context, it's not literally about consuming food, or the disease known as consumption, and that entities that aren't individual consumers in the nightly news sense of the word are called 'consumers' as well.

In this instance semantics isn't insightful.

There's a conversation to be had about how much money Red is making from selling luxury goods to amateurs but this thread probably isn't the best place.

> if any claim gets invalidated, the rest that rely on it are useless.

This misunderstanding came up in another thread. If a dependent claim is invalidated, then it invalidates the claims it depends from, but not the other way around. For example, consider the following claims:

1. A method comprising steps A, B, and C.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising step D.

If the prior art only teaches claim 1, then claim 2 could still be valid if the addition of step D is non-obvious over the prior art. If the prior art teaches claim 2, however, then claim 1 is also invalid.

> Red isn't a consumer company. How are they anti-consumer?

Everything is consumer these days. CNC machines, milling machines, soldering stations, tablesaws, planers, and, yes, high-end cinematic cameras.

You're no longer talking about Hollywood and maybe 4 or 5 other big studios leveraging this stuff. Marques Brownlee, Linus Tech Tips, Corridor, and tons of other Youtubers (and I'm sure many more from other platforms) eat these things like candy. If you or I wanted to get into this stuff, we reasonably could with a little financial discipline (and maybe bargaining with our significant other :D).

They are unimaginably vulnerable to someone coming along with a platform that accepts any, say, NVME, with some form of "works best with" certification system. That way, if your risk is low ( enthused hobbyist) go with your MLC dumpster diving special, if your risk is high then go with OEM, certified, or better (because there is better storage than what Red offers). Keep in mind that Red have supplanted a stupidly broken industry with a vastly less broken industry, but on the absolute scale they are still pretty fucking stupid. They are living on the time it takes for someone to realize that, given a huge amount of R&D into a sensor (because Red is likely the leading sensor), a more capitalist/competitive approach exists.

> Marques Brownlee, Linus Tech Tips, Corridor,

are not consumers but media businesses.

When did the consumer stop being the ones who consume the product?

I’m sure many farmers would consider John Deere’s practices regarding DIY repairs, anti-consumer, as they are the consumers. Any person who might reasonable be considered an end-user of a product, or might buy a type of product might be considered a consumer of that type of product.

Anti-consumerism and protectionism do not even require that you be a customer of the company in question, some practices extend beyond the product itself when the company seeks to stifle competition.

Can I ask you a question?

Did you actually believe, or even think about the position you're now taking prior to reading the comment thread about it?

I'm highly skeptical that someone genuinely holds the position "businesses aren't consumers."

I think it's more likely that you're just arbitrarily taking a contrarian position to argue online to pass the time.

That line between "business" and "consumer" is becoming increasingly indistinct. This is the very nature of "influencers." We have every-day-joes/janes setting up multi-thousand dollar machines in their own (or rented) garage for their own, or followers', enjoyment.

> are not consumers but media businesses.

This idea of yours is extremely out of touch with reality, just like Red are. Those "media businesses" would be nowhere without an engaged audience. The modern audience are participators, not watchers. Commodity 3D printers have succeeded for a reason.

People aren't as one-dimensional as they used to be. They take their interests to an extreme degree. It might take a videography/cinematography enthusiast 2 years to save up for a Red, but they will.

Influencers are businesses, plain and simple. They buy the camera to make a profit.

Compare this to someone like me, who also owns expensive cameras, but I have them to take pictures and show my friends. I plan to make $0 from this endeavor. I'm a consumer, not a business.

And you don't care about the immensely expensive Red SSDs?

Oh, I shoot stills on Sony equipment, so I just use good old SD cards. And film when I need high resolution ;)

I agree that RED is cost-prohibitive for individuals that aren't running a business because of things like the 500% markup on SSDs. That is always the risk of a proprietary ecosystem; kind of like how you can buy 128GB of RAM for your PC for a few hundred dollars, but the same RAM in an Apple computer is $1600. That's just the price of "we guarantee that it will work", and for business use, it makes a lot of sense. For consumers, it kind of sucks, because you feel so close to being able to afford something really cool, but you just can't make the math work.

I do understand the pushback; people want to pay for the impressive sensor and not the mind-numbingly-boring SSDs, but they want to make money on both. I am not sure that's strictly consumer unfriendly, but just how they do the financial engineering.

Because anti-competition is anti-consumer.

isn't the whole basis of capitalism that capital drives competition which drives innovation and consumerism?

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