Kodak sues Tesla for using stolen technology for Autopilot | Hacker News Reader

Kodak sues Tesla for using stolen technology for Autopilot

cleanenergyrevolution.co

28 pointsronron469315 comments

The actual complaint: https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Monumen...

Looks like a patent troll (it's not Kodak, it's "MONUMENT PEAK VENTURES, LLC") who thinks they have patents covering basically anything that uses computer vision segmentation.

Kodak sold its digital imaging patent portfolio, about 1,100 patents, in 2012 to get out of bankruptcy: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kodak-patent-sale-idUSBRE.... It looks like this company’s parent company now owns the portfolio.

Yeah. Point 8 in that has:

    MPV owns a portfolio of patents invented by the Eastman Kodak Company.  Since
    acquiring the Kodak portfolio, MPV has promoted adoption of technologies
    claimed in Kodak portfolio and has entered into license agreements with over
    thirty companies.

“In addition, Tesla has not made improving its self-driving technology a major priority”

As an FSD beta user for the past few years, this statement seems uninformed.

Can anyone give anymore info about the patents actually being infringed upon? The linked article within the OP article was a dead end.

Indeed. FSD/Autopilot is no where near the time line that Tesla and Musk said it'd be, but it's vastly improved from when I purchased my Model 3 in 2018.

'in the US'. My father's neighbor have a Tesla (and conveniently is also a windsurfer, so I hitchhike sometime), Fsd isn't available here, and won't be anytime soon, seeing how the deployment of the beta in Belgium is going (wasn't it supposed to be in 2020?). Hopefully he won't have to pay for it again in his Next car.

I realise it's a patent troll, but even if it were Kodak, it seems a bit silly that a company developing self driving cars could be sued for patent infringement by a company who isn't even in the industry. A competetor I could understand. If you don't have skin in the game, then you don't deserve to have pieces of paper preventing others from putting their skin in the game.

What if Kodak, a visual image company, has a patent in computer vision on (say) absolutely the best method of recognising objects in real time.

Would that be useful to a self driving car company for processing camera data in real time despite Kodak not having built a car?

Patent law needs complete overhaul. They restrict innovation, iteration and slow the pace of progress. Two things I'd implement if I were "king of the world" - If you're not the entity which is using or can prove that have active plans to use the patent, you cannot sue anyone for using it. - Patents last 15 or 20 years and cannot be extended, after that it's in the public domain.

Patents are already limited to 15-20 years.

Fair enough. Maybe that's not long short enough then for the current pace of change.

No, it's okay. I think Copyright should be aligned on patents, and 15 years seems good enough.

What's needed is more case law, as it has happened with copyright.

I feel like doing R&D to develop technology with the intent of licensing that technology rather than developing your own products is fine.

They also encourage innovation, iteration and speed up the pace of progress by providing an incentive.

This is a troll lawsuit. We really need to get rid of patents for software in this country.

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