YogaGlo Patent Dropped

Regarding the white background patent, I'm by no means a professional photographer but the majority of the items in their patent strike me as basic if not incredibly obvious to a photographer that specializes in this type of work. The first figure is a 4 point lighting setup, something that you could find in hundreds of different textbooks. Their lens selection ( 85mm ) is in no way novel. There is always some debate, but many photographers prefer either an 85mm or 100mm for portraiture. If you look around you will find groups dedicated to taking portraits with the Canon 85mm 1.2L. I'm having a hard time finding how their claim does anything other than describe almost every photography studio in existence. Many video and photo studios even have a white cyclorama built right into the walls, it is almost their default behavior to facilitate what the patent claims to be unique.

It is possible that their specific claims relate to some of their very specific ratios and distances, but it seems like a stretch to me.

That flowchart is bizarre. I don't understand how "live stream occurs in realtime" happens after downloading the recorded video and editing it. Is this the process of making a recorded yoga video appear to be live?

Is there no penalty for applicants and prosecutors -- especially considering that for the latter patent prosecution is a part of their licensed profession (assuming they are attorneys) -- for such apparently deliberate mis-representations?

It seems that as long as there is no or minimal cost for such abuse, it will continue.

Thanks for noting this. I'm hoping that a highly parameterized patent is also struck down for the same reasons, especially if it's a subset of their previous patent.

It's funny how, knowing little about yoga, you can develop their scheme.

1. It's a yoga class! Mats are often used, to provide traction and personal space. Arrange the mats in the room.

2. Camcorder on the floor... Who does that? So you put it on a tripod, a few feet off the ground. Too high makes it unfamiliar for the viewer, like you're looking down on everyone.

3. Focus on the instructor! But... the instructor walks off to help a student... Maybe try and capture more of the class by zooming out.

4. Students stand up during poses and block your view of the instructor. Move their mats out of the line of sight!

Simply tightening the parameters doesn't make this less obvious, and their "look and feel" claim is nonsense.

Part of the problem is that, thanks partly to precedents from earlier decisions, 'obvious' and 'prior art' have taken on special meanings that do not conform to either common usage or common sense.

Sounds similar to Amazon's patented white background photography.

It seems that this is the whole point of patent law. It's a subsidy to people with access to money and power. That it may be used to some effect by smaller interests is a "happy" by-product of the scheme.

Once you grant that ideas are property and should be protected in the same way, it seems to me that this is the inevitable result.

When you're trying to incite emotion, you never want to give the impression of inevitability against your side. Even if you fully expected it to happen, you are still shocked, and possibly even appalled. It helps to give your readers an idea of what kind of emotions they should be feeling.

"Just as we expected, the patent was granted" - Bummer. Wish there was something I could do about it. Next article.

"Needless to say, we were pretty shocked when the patent was granted." - Oh my god! Even the experts think this needs to be handled! (I especially love it with the 'needless to say' part... it makes it sound so much more obvious that you should be outraged).

There's nothing wrong with writing like this (unless you're a serious journalist, I guess). I'm just pointing out why they stated the obvious the way they did. I'm pretty sure the EFF does the same thing in their patent posts.

Mods: Can you fix the URL to drop the #disqus_thread target?

sorry, that was my bad. I can't change it now, I don't think

The problem with the YogaGlo patent is that covered basically what you would do if you wanted to film a yoga class and thought about it for five minutes... and there was plenty of "prior art" using the same strategy.

If it was a truly novel thing involving (say) a camera rig for capturing more angles, or using 3d modeling to highlight specific body angles and positions, I might be sympathetic, but this patent was approximately "put a camera in a yoga studio".

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/octobers-very-bad-no-g...

This kind of patent is nothing more than what clever and dedicated people could do. I'm sure that in the history of filming one could find such setup - for how many decades have instructional videos be produced?

They just, as good weasels, found a weaselly way to patent an not-so-special idea, and patented it, with the assumption that if somebody finds a similar way of filming, say, 4 feet from the ground instead of 3, he certainly not going to have a few million dollars to proceed in court - we're talking about yoga, not android devices (ahem...).

Keep in mind, most importantly, that asserting that this patent is ridiculous doesn't equal or implies that any idea should be free for anyone to copy.

I can't imagine why film shots should be patentable. It's just using a camera in a certain way. For example, imagine if someone patented the dolly zoom[1]. It would be similar to patenting using a tennis racket to swat at bees.

[1]: http://youtu.be/rW23RsUTb2Y?t=2m1s

What's the precedent for Hollywood directors copying each other's interesting new techniques? I ask because I genuinely don't know, but it seems like that would be a decent analogy. If Cameron invents/discovers/whatever a new shot or method or angle, can Bay use it without paying? If so, I think that's your answer.

Yes, since it doesn't seem like something that costs billians in R&D and needs a patent for a government-enforced monopoly to make back those costs.

(wow, -4! I guess I need to choose my wording even more carefully! Sorry about seemingly not taking the right side here, people!)