IMAX’s absurd attempt to censor Ars
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is why IMAX is annoyed: they understand that VR is a huge threat to their business. The reason watching a movie on a very large screen is better than watching it up-close on a small screen is that in the case of the large screen, your eyes can relax by focusing at infinity. With VR, you can effectively simulate an infinitely large screen infinitely far away.
In theory.
But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset needs to be to support it. And considering that VR screens are already an inch from your face (and thus require a high-ish resolution to just basically "work") we're talking about better-than-exist resolution screens for that form-factor.
I don't legitimately consider IMAX's business threatened by VR headsets in the next ten or so years, and even then we'll have to see how well people like wearing a VR headset on their face (which might hurt necks, feel uncomfortable, suck for glasses wearers, etc).
VR is better now than at any point in history. But people are pretending like it will definitely succeed. But Google already cancelled Google Glass (and, no, Google Cardboard isn't the same thing). This might be another "3D" flop all over again.
2) It doesn't have to be clear that VR will succeed for it to represent a threat to IMAX's business.
However, clearly you can get away with far less than that. But, the point where increasing resolution is not noticeable at some level is ridiculously high.
Both we agree on #1, we both said the same thing.
> It doesn't have to be clear that VR will succeed for it to represent a threat to IMAX's business.
I literally don't understand what it is you're trying to say.
If VR fails, it isn't a threat to IMAX business by definition. Something that isn't popular or doesn't exist cannot be a threat to something else.
No one would argue that the coming gen vr devices are at the pixels per degree of IMAX, that's just wrong.
Edit: why are so many comments (particularly top level ones) down voted in this thread?
No, I said it cannot do virtual screen rendering at lower resolutions. mubard agreed. The virtual screen would look terrible as you pulled back if the resolution wasn't high enough to support it (which I don't believe it is, yet).
"But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset"
That is wrong, plain and simple. How far the movie screen appears in the VR headset has no impact whatsoever on pixelization and is purely a stereoscopic effect.
We're talking about rendering pre-existing video at those distances, so it absolutely DOES cause pixelation as fewer pixels are used to render the video content than its native resolution.
A lot of people calling me wrong seem to be under the odd mistaken impression that we're rendering some generic object far away, but the discussion is about display pre-existing video footage at a distance.
If the VR headset is 1080p and the video footage is 1080p, if you put it far away (i.e. it only takes up 50% or 25% of the VR headset's screen real-estate) then it obviously cannot be rendered using all 1080p of the video's original pixels (since many are in use on the VR headset's display for non-video footage) and therefore a loss of detail is unavoidable.
The only solution to this is having a higher PPI than the source video. And as you move the video footage further and further away, the PPI needs to increase to keep the video footage rendered at its native resolution.
And if you're wondering: "but then what's the difference"? The difference is based on a number of perceptual clues, such as
- at what distance do your eyes have to focus (this one isn't handled by current generation VR displays and will be the trickiest to get)
- vergence: what the angle between your eyes is
- parallax between the screen and other objects in your field of view
If you stretch a fixed number of pixels you reduce the detail.
If you shrink a fixed number of pixels and display that at the same or lower resolution, you reduce detail.
In either case detail is lost.
If you were watching a 1000 pixels wide, 1 meter wide TV from one meter away, the level of details you perceive would be the same as if you were watching a 1000 pixels wide, 100 meter wide movie screen from 100 meters away.
The physical pixels on the movie screen would be larger, but you would perceive the same level of detail because they would touch the same number of rods on your retina.
If the two screens touch the same number of rods in your retina, how can you tell you're looking at a small screen upclose vs a large screen away? Several clues: parallax, vergence, and focus. VR can simulate two of those.
So if you were looking at the images produced by the VR set up for a large screen far away vs a small screen close by, they would occupy the same number of pixels on the VR display, the same! It would be just as detailed. But in one case, the two eyes would show you the images from two different angles, whereas in the other, the images would be much more similar. This is the only distance we're talking about, the perceptual distance created by the VR.
In all cases you're looking at the same number of pixels a few centimers away from your eyes, but perceptually it can be made to appear as if watching a large screen at a distance or a small screen upclose.
If you still don't understand, I can't help you beyond that point.
> If the VR headset is 1080p and the video footage is 1080p, if you put it far away (i.e. it only takes up 50% or 25% of the VR headset's screen real-estate)
How far away it appears has nothing to do with the viewing angle, unless you also mention the virtual size of the virtual screen. A 10" screen at 1ft away will have a smaller viewing angle than a 1,000,000ft screen 500ft away.
Meaning objects get smaller, meaning that they take up less space on the resolution, meaning that you need higher PPI to render them at the same level of detail.
> How far away it appears has nothing to do with the viewing angle
Nobody is talking about viewing angles. I certainly never brought it up.
Why? It's a virtual screen, why wouldn't you scale it up as well as moving it further? The sky is really far away from me, but it's pretty huge in my field of vision.
> Nobody is talking about viewing angles. I certainly never brought it up.
Which is why we are all saying you're wrong. It's entirely dependent on viewing angle and not distance. Distance and virtual screen size are how you can determine the viewing angle.
> "But the "further" away you project the virtual movie screen, the higher the resolution of the VR headset needs to be to support it."
He's saying that's not true. He's also right. The resolution the physical VR screens need is completely unrelated to "how far" you project the virtual screen.
It ultimately boils down to "when detail gets smaller than a single pixel, it is lost." So the smaller the pixel the more detail you can render.
To be honest if you're watching non-HD resolution content, current generation VR headsets at the high end might be able to project it across the room and maintain detail. But HD? S-HD? IMAX? Meh, we aren't there yet.
And I agree with another comment that there is a "cap" on PPI. Once you reach it the human eye becomes the limitation, not the screen(s).
It really doesn't work that way. If your VR display is too low-resolution to convincingly render a virtual display 15 feet away, then it's too low-resolution to convincingly render the virtual display 15 inches away. Your physical display has the same resolution regardless of where the virtual screen is, and if it lacks sufficient resolution to render an object convincingly, it just cannot do it regardless of how distantly the object is rendered. To put it another way, your display has the ability to render a certain amount of detail, full stop. Where a virtual object is rendered is irrelevant.
Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display.
But we're talking about a virtual display displaying pre-existing content (e.g. video footage). We aren't talking about the object itself.
If it is one foot from you in virtual space, each pixel of video footage might be mapped 1:1 into each pixel of the VR headset's screen resolution. Therefore the loss of detail is 0%. Every pixel of video detail is transposed onto the display in the VR headset.
If the virtual object is further way (e.g. six feet) it takes up a smaller percentage of the VR headset's display, and therefore fewer physical pixels on the VR headset's display are used to render it. So now instead of 1:1 you might be 1:4, and you're seeing 25% of the video's original detail actually rendered on the VR headset's display.
> Try this. Sit close to your monitor, close enough that text isn't crisp enough. Now zoom your display (Ctrl+'+' in most browsers), which is equivalent to bringing a virtual display closer. Note that the text still isn't crisp. If you could see the pixelation before, you can still see it. Moving the virtual display closer does nothing, because you aren't adding more resolution to the physical display.
Your analogy is backwards and doesn't apply.
But sticking to that same analogy, go get 1080p resolution image. View it on a 1080p display. You're seeing 1:1 (100%) of the detail within the image (all of it). Now zoom out, and again, and again. Detail has been lost. First a little, then a lot, and as you go too far back substantial amounts have been. This is because a 1080p image on a 1080p display can only display 100% of the detail when it is viewed at 100%. As the image is zoomed (or further away in the VR headset's case) it is not possible to continue to consume all of the details as the pixels don't physically exist to display it.
So solve this problem you need a higher resolution than the source material, and it gets higher and higher the more you zoom. If you viewed a 1080p image on a 8640p display, you could zoom out significantly with absolutely no loss of detail, because the pixel density is such that it can still render every dot within the image.
So in order for a VR headset to be able to render stuff far away with no loss of detail the resolution of the headset has to be much higher than the source video. The further away the video gets, the higher the resolution. Again, that is if you want absolutely no loss of detail (in the real world, some loss of detail is acceptable).
In order to play back a 1080p video on a 1080p VR headset, the video either needs to be right in front of the viewer (at 1:1), you'll have to accept loss of detail when moving it further away, or you'll need a higher resolution on the VR headset than the source video (e.g. 4x more pixels on the headset than the source video, when it only takes up 1/4th of the VR headset's display space).
If the virtual display-video is only 1cm squared on each of the VR headset's displays, then that 1cm needs to have the same pixels as 1080p to display 1080p video with no loss of detail. It is just physics. As you move things further away in virtual reality they get rendered by fewer pixels on the real-world VR headset displays, and therefore loss of detail is unavoidable. You can only counteract this with higher PPI than the source video (or just accepting the loss of detail).
If you can actually map pixels 1:1, you aren't in a virtual space anyway. Accomplishing this 1:1 mapping means locking the view into a single position. If you allow me to look around, then as soon as I turn my head, the angle skews and you're not mapping 1:1 any more.
> So now instead of 1:1 you might be 1:4, and you're seeing 25% of the video's original detail actually rendered on the VR headset's display.
If 1:1 looks good, then 1:4 rendered 4 times as far away looks exactly as good. If you can't see the pixels at 1:1 then you can't see the lost detail at 1:4. If you could see the lost detail at 1:4, it would mean the 1:1 image looks pixelated. Again, your physical display doesn't care about how far away something is rendered. It has a fixed resolution, and if it's too low to be convincing, it's too low to be convincing at any rendered distance.
Go play an N64 game (or find some screenshots). You'll see that everything in the foreground is pretty rough looking. Everything in the background is equally rough looking, because rendered distance doesn't change the display resolution.
> Now zoom out, and again, and again. Detail has been lost. First a little, then a lot, and as you go too far back substantial amounts have been.
This doesn't matter. If it looks good at 1:1, then it will look good at 1:4. If it doesn't look good at 1:4, it didn't look good at 1:1. The lost detail is irrelevant.
> In order to play back a 1080p video on a 1080p VR headset...
I'm pretty sure you just can't do this convincingly, no matter the "zoom" level. If you rendered the video taking the entire display, then it would unpleasantly fill your entire vision and it wouldn't be VR and it would look terrible anyway.
> that 1cm needs to have the same pixels as 1080p to display 1080p video with no loss of detail
You're stuck on the idea that you need 1:1 pixels. You don't. You need a display with sufficient resolution to be convincing to your eyes. Once you have that, you can render your virtual 1080p image at any distance that would work in the real world and not care about how pixels are mapping.
There is no way to interpret what was said to say "SteamVR is the same thing as IMAX, from the same people, etc."
And there's a difference in saying "Twice the resolution of IMAX!" (for example) and saying "It's like having an IMAX theater in your house." Those aren't the same kinds of statements.
This is a different issue -- of course IMAX /could/ license it; it's possible. The issue is whether people believe IMAX /has/ licensed it. This may be your point, but it's not clear to me.
If I say "this car is as good as a BMW", do you think I'm saying that the car is a BMW? If I say "the guitar my uncle made plays as smoothly as a Les Paul", do you think I'm saying I have Les Paul's signature on the headstock?
I think the comparisons and analogies are understood as such; I doubt the average consumer thinks the SteamVR has anything to do with IMAX.
Believing that a VR solution could be certified/licensed by IMAX is not consumer confusion, that's accurate belief. IMAX could certify a VR solution as "The IMAX Experience" if they wanted to. But hell, Harley-Davidson could certify a VR solution as "The Open Road Experience" [1], too. Still no one is going to think a headset is a motorcycle.
[1] I made this up. I'm pretty sure Harley-Davidson does not use this as a motto/slogan/trademark/whatever.
The value of the IMAX trademark is that it's a set of standards for image projection, which is how it's being used in the quote. As if the product, which is concerned with image projection, is up to those standards.
Harley-Davidson, to my knowledge, isn't involved in image projection standards.
Say a lamp which isn't UL certified had a quote "It's like having a UL certified lamp in your house!" Would that seem ok? Or maybe questionable?
What article did you read? The quote most certainly did not refer to IMAX as a "set of standards for image projection". Here's the quote again:
> "The jump up in tech between playing a normal video game and playing with Kinect was X. The jump between a regular game and playing a room scale VR experience is X times 100. It’s like saying, 'I have an IMAX theater in my house.' It’s so much better that we can get away with a cumbersome setup."
There's nothing here about standards for image projection. The quote doesn't even compare the visual quality of SteamVR to IMAX. It says the jump in experience from a regular game to "room scale VR" is like the jump of putting an IMAX theater in your house. The quote is specifically about the huge improvement in the experience. You can tell because he literally referred to the "experience".
And none of this matters, because even if he had actually been saying that SteamVR looks like an IMAX screen, that would still not create consumer confusion. Comparing products' quality is a reasonable thing and we do it all the time without creating confusion. Someone reviewing a Samsung LCD could say that it looks as good as their Panasonic plasma, and this is a reasonable and probably useful comparison to make. It wouldn't confuse any reasonable person into believing that Panasonic was manufacturing, certifying, or licensing Samsung displays (or vice versa).
> Say a lamp which isn't UL certified had a quote "It's like having a UL certified lamp in your house!" Would that seem ok? Or maybe questionable?
It seems like a stupid thing to say because the statement doesn't make a lot of sense. Saying "It's like having a UL certified lamp in your house!" is kind of like saying "It's like having a car that won't kill you in a crash!" It reads like sarcasm. No one would make this comparison in a serious way.
But no, I don't think it creates any kind of consumer confusion.
You can't see how that quote implies it's up to IMAX standards? Why even use the IMAX name if not to invoke the idea that it's up to their standards?
You're completely missing the point anyway. You keep debating your ridiculous interpretation of the quote and it doesn't matter because even if your interpretation of the quote were correct, there would be no confusion created. Here, I'll say the thing you're pretending the quote says:
"SteamVR looks exactly like an IMAX screen"
No one will read that and think IMAX is selling, licensing, creating, or certifying SteamVR, because there's nothing in there that says that. Nor will anyone thing that SteamVR and IMAX are the same thing, because if they were the same thing, you wouldn't be comparing them.
The test isn't whether someone can believe it, in the sense that it isn't physically impossible that at least one person could believe it. Thankfully. It's, according to the article, whether there's a likelyhood of confusion. I.e. whether an average, reasonably prudent consumer would be likely to be confused.
I think more relevant is that if it is a competing experience, then the comparison -- especially in the context of promoting SteamVR by someone with a vested interest (including someone intending to sell software for the SteamVR platform) -- raises issues of trademark dilution and/or misappropriation even in the absence of the specific kind of consumer confusion that would be necessary for trademark infringement.
I try not to downvote people for mere opinions that differ from mine, but I will downvote people whose posts are just uninformed or simply wrong.
(I didn't downvote here, because I'm not super familiar with how the courts interpret consumer confusion, but I suspect that the parent is just wrong about the term, and it's not just a matter of opinion).
Now all comments are the same color, regardless of votes.
I dislike the fading mechanism for the reasons I describe here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9746702
Which is too late by now anyway, since I have tons of them.
I don't understand why the mods think discouraging people from expressing unpopular opinions is desirable. It puzzles me to the extent that I wonder if I misunderstand the purpose of having comments at all. But it's how it is.
See dragonwriter's comment for a good concise clarification.
As far as the legal concept goes, it should be clear that I'm just interpreting what IMAX's general counsel seems to believe. Whether you agree with her or not, I wouldn't say she's uninformed on the topic.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/imax-apologizes-t...
1) The mechanic silences an opinion by making it harder to read/requiring highlighting to read
2) Swaying public opinion of a comment without even reading it. "Oh, it's already almost faded out entirely. It's probably a terrible post that I should just downvote without actually reading." (E: I understand HN requires you to "spend" a karma to downvote something. This doesn't prevent people from using their karma in this manner when they have 1,000's)
3) Allows self-validation of "others agree with me, because this comment has been downvoted and I disagree with this comment", which is fallacious reasoning. Popular/majority opinion can be wrong and patting yourself on the back for having other people agree with you can be detrimental. Self-validation without critically thinking about your opponents arguments is an injustice to them.
I have a rule in Stylish to set "font" to #333 so that all comments appear the same for me. Unless someone mentions "why is this downvoted", I'm completely unaware of any comments being downvoted. I find this leads to a better experience on HN.
Note: For #3 I use "you/yourself" in a "third party not necessarily you 'you'" way.
"Hmm, we know we have nothing to stand on here, but if we politely ask Ars to remove references to IMAX and they do, matter ends there. If Ars doesn't comply, we just lost 5 minutes of drafting this pointless letter. Nothing really to lose."
Hits send.
The irony? IMAX is now paying the real cost of that poor decision. Bad publicity and worse - the revelation that they are insecure about and feel threatened by emergent technologies. Talk about pissing on your own product.
It's kind of amusing if you call a legal bluff, the other party now has two bad choices: either they will have to go away quietly and the issue will remain or they have to actually sue and will most likely lose (that's never guaranteed).
The real downside is not that these lawyers make dubious or baseless legal claims (it's up to you to respond or take them serious or not), the problem is that most people will not feel qualified to make that call and so will either comply or run up some legal expenses.
So for small entities (private individuals for instance) folding is usually the only option. In this case Ars was a pretty dumb target of such a C&D, they're part of the media and will of course use it to maximum effect.
Of course, being lawyers, they would probably put in some fine print that states that no legal threat is implied, or something like that.
Companies can loose their trademark if the term becomes generic, and one way to defend against that in court is to show a history of defending the mark (I'm not lawyer but that's my simplistic explanation) this is a great article explaining the phenomena around derby pie
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/01/399842082/wha...
My bet is that they are weighing the lesser of two evils (to them) loose their trademark or look like a fool in the press for a few days...
All the lawyers are doing is chasing a pay check
This is ridiculous on its face. Its not like some competitor made an IMAXy Projector. This was a quote in a press article. This is a speech issue that has nothing to do with dilution, which is obvious if you bothered to read the article where Mary Ruby assaults ars staff with a weird rant about how VR cant compete with IMAX.
Frankly, the fact that trademark abusing corporations have people repeating their bullshit is scary.
All publicity is good publicity, right?
As for the new IMAX screens, not only is it the size of the screen, but the quality of the projector and speaker setup not to mention the actual proportion of the screen as well.
There are only a handful of "true original" IMAX screens. I'm not hating on their brand, I know they've needed to dilute to actually not go bankrupt, but it's important to note that there is a legitimate difference between "large format" (that's the term that's replacing IMAX for legalities sake and so IMAX competitors can be introduced and undercut IMAX licensing fees) and IMAX.
To be totally honest, they're in a lot of trouble as a company and they desperately need to find a way to save their product before competitors like Regals "RPX Experience" ruin them.
I still love IMAX.
Having to recline and look up at the screen was annoying, and the size was gratuitous with most of it wasted to peripheral vision. That's definitely not something I'd want in my living room.
From what I understand, movies shot specifically for IMAX are meant to be framed something like a stage play, with your eyes wandering around the screen rather than staying fixed near the center.
Of course, that presumes the movie was made for it (or had a cut framed specifically for it), rather than just being "normal theatrical cut but bigger".
Sadly, the IMAX CEO says screen size does not matter [1] and thus the majority of them are being replaced by smaller digital screens in multiplexes. lfexaminer.com has a great list of IMAX theaters and their formats [2].
[1] http://www.wired.com/2009/05/imax-ceo-screen-size-isnt-every...
IMAX, especially as current IMAX Digital theaters have similar screen sizes and also only 2.8K (two 2K projectors on the same screen), just isn’t really worth it anymore.
It's a horrible experience. You can buy a horribly cheap TV, a 5.1 sound system and plop it in your living room and get a better experience. Getting the sound right takes a long time, but my end conclusion was that suspending bunch of cardboard everywhere seemed to negate the poor acoustics of the room.
The first feature is a function of sitting to close to the screen, and isn't specific to IMAX format. The second is by design -- a major point of large-format cinema screens like IMAX is to provide a more immersive experience by making it so that, in shots where there is a strong central focus, even the non-focal parts of your vision field are occupied by the movie screen rather than (usually, just black) background from the theater, and, second, enabling shots that are composed so as to invite audience members to not just focus near center, but to look around the screen (this second feature isn't taken advantage of in films not designed for large-format screens, but major films now generally are made in a large-format aware manner.)
[1] http://www.lfexaminer.com/20081016.htm [2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/imax-looking-punie...
IMAX's legal counsel failed to see the big picture.
": Consumer electronic products, namely, headphones, earphones, cables, camcorders, DVD players and stereos; home theater systems comprised of a projector system, a surround sound system, a screen, media servers and control devices; and gaming equipment, namely, video game machines for use with televisions and computers; video game controllers; computer software for playing video games and for accessing and browsing global computer and communications networks; video game programs downloadable from global computer networks and global communications networks; and user manuals for all of the aforementioned software and devices sold as a unit therewith; devices used to facilitate interactive game play over computer networks; television and video converters; speakers, loudspeakers systems"
http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4808:77u...
http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/samsung-unveils-virtual...
Samsung's VR will offer "a selection of IMAX films in a virtual theater".
Samsung's VR is based on Oculus tech, and actually will be an IMAX theater in your house.
Heh.
Well that shut them up!…
In other words, no matter how silly and innocent the passing reference to IMAX is, is it possible that IMAX lawyers must pursue those genericized uses even though those lawyers (and the client IMAX itself) knows it generates negative publicity?
A natural human tendency is to speak with similes & metaphors. "Yosemite Valley is like a jacked up IMAX for nature lovers" or "my budding friend the film student with his overuse of lens flares thinks he's the second coming of J.J. Abrahams".
The tension between trademark enforcements and natural human tendencies to color conversations with innocuous references to pop culture creates silly-looking "cease & desist" letters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark#Trademark_er...
Yes, everyone agrees that they were refering to IMAX. It is also legal for them to do so (and for Ars to publish this opinion) without seeking permission from IMAX first. Some people on HN are surprisingly disagreeing with this (or at least condoning IMAX's response)
Also, the law shouldn't be that trivial uses of the mark like this work to erode it, but the law is not precise on the issue so mark holders tend to have to be verzealous in showing their defense of the mark.
This letter is just a lett-er not worth the non-paper it's not-written on.
The whole purpose of the letter is to be able to show diligence in court if the mark is threatened... not to attempt to get Ars to do anything different.
Are should know that too... but I guess they feel this is good link bait. (personally I think it adds tarnish to Ars's reputation, by making them look like rubes.)
No, this is absolute bunk. There is no reason for this. At least in the US this is protected by Nominative Use, which guarantees that "a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own."
Further: "Nominative use does not require that ownership of the trademark be acknowledged, for example by use of a sentence such as "UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group"."
IMAX's lawyers are clearly overreaching here.
I suppose they don't and I'm not disagreeing with you on that.
The IMAX situation may be different in that their trademark is very catchy sounding (2 syllables "eye"-"macks") and is getting pulled (by innocent human tendencies) into a lot of conversations unrelated to IMAX(tm) theaters. When people use words like "AMD" and "Honda", it doesn't seem to erode their trademark. But for some reason with "IMAX", and "google", and "kleenex", it does. In other words, most people haven't genericized "Honda" to the point of saying "I'm going to Honda my but to the grocery store."
Are the cultural references to "IMAX" trending towards trademark desctruction such as "kleenex" and "escalator"[1] or are the usages actually trademark preserving such as "AMD" and "Honda"?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalator#Loss_of_trademark_ri...
Now, that's just me, but I can imagine it being similar for most people.
When most people think of fascial tissue, they think of Kleenex. They call any brand of fascial tissue Kleenex.
IMAX doesn't want people calling any large format theater IMAX. So they over-reach anytime someone mentions the word I assume.
Not justifying the actions, just trying to clear things up. Personally, I think it's ridiculous.
Something else you have to consider is intent. It doesn't seem that Ars intended to dilute IMAX's brand by publishing a quote, and it doesn't seem to be the intent of the person quoted either. It was simply a frame of reference.
> IMAX doesn't want people calling any large format theater IMAX
Here's the thing: Nobody did that in the Ars article. A piece of VR tech was casually compared to the IMAX experience by someone being interviewed by Ars.
I'm not saying any theater but I have noticed that some visitors to Epcot refer to the Canada and China 360-degree movies as "IMAX". The actual designation is "CircleVision 360". But people don't remember that 7-syllable trademark. The first word that comes to the tip of their tongue is "IMAX" because that word has become a placeholder for "any immersive large screen experience".
>Something else you have to consider is intent.
Yes, but society's casual use of "Escalator" to "escalator" and "Kleenex" to "kleenex" didn't have any kind of mastermind conspiracy to dilute the trademark. It just happened. I'm guessing most trademarks erode without malicious intent.
Could Otis Escalator and Kleenex lawyers have done anything to stop the trademark erosion?
The difference is that Kleenex facial tissues and Otis Escalators (moving staircases?) are unique terms that have no other well known counterparts or alternative generic terms. It is unlikely that IMAX is going to replace the generic term movie theater, and even less likely that the general public is going to distinguish between movie theater and large screen format movie theater -- it's just a bigger screen for what is otherwise the same.
Do people make a distinction between THX and Dolby Digital sound systems in theaters and say let's go see something at the THX or Dolby Digital? That doesn't happen because those technologies only contribute to the experience, they don't define it as something unique.
Of course they don't. But that doesn't give them legal ground to send out C&Ds when people do. They're allowed to protect their trademark in specific, legally defined situations. This isn't one of them, no matter how much IMAX wishes it were so.
Also, there is no evidence that this is what happened here! The developer quoted by Ars might/might not have literally been referring to IMAX(tm). Only he knows for sure. This is not what the lawyer was whining about either - they were claiming that Ars should have sought permission from IMAX before using the trademarked term in the article. Which is bullshit.
I don't understand how people can condone that - it's only a stones-throw away from a scenario where Google/Apple sues you for using their trademark without permission in your negative comment about one of their products.
Real-life examples include "give me a kleenex" when you just want any random facial tissue, "give me a coke" when you're just asking for any soft drink (this use is common in some places, while in other places it means only the actual Coca-Cola product), or "I xeroxed this document" when you have no idea of the actual brand of the copier.
Just using the trademark as a comparison doesn't do it, as far as I understand it.
This is actually still an example of trademark erosion, even if referring to an actual IMAX theater. This is using the brand to refer to the abstract thing. It's not an IMAX. It's an IMAX theater.
For a relevant example, look at Google's guidance to journalists. They say not to write "I googled X", but "I searched for X using Google". Using "google" as the verb, even when literally referring to Google, erodes the brand, because it conflates the brand with the thing.
You see the impact of this sort of brand erosion with the iPad. The iPad dominates the tablet space, so the constant references to iPads have started to genericize the term to the point that other tablets are often called iPads (which erodes the brand to a greater extent). Contrarily, BMW for example gets away with this because BMWs do not dominate the market, so there is little danger of "BMW" becoming synonymous with the car. IMAX dominates its market so the brand is quite in danger of becoming a synonym for a giant screen. The smaller erosions are therefore a bigger concern.
This is so, so far outside of the rights of trademark that it is just plain abusive. This sort of behavior comes about not from attempting to protect ones brand from unfair usage, but from thinking one's moneyed influence allows them to do whatever they want.
Just because you can philosophically conceive of a stretch by which an egregious abuse might possibly not be one, doesn't mean you're helping at all.
"SteamVR ... feels like an 'IMAX in your house'" --Ars Technica
It's as if Ars had said "we googled up their website" while showing a picture of them using Bing, or if they had said "We enjoyed some Coke after the demo" and had a picture of them holding a can of Pepsi.
I'm not saying that this letter isn't ridiculous, but just realize what the job of the internal lawyer is at IMAX: Her job is to defend all mainstream attempts to use their brand name out of context, she doesn't seriously expect arstechnica to comply- It's just that people in the past have lost rights to trademarks they failed to defend, so she is pretty much obligated to write these silly letters.
No, it's not that at all. Ars was making a comparison to actual IMAX, not using it as a generic.
"This new pepsi tastes as good as coke"
I'd say that's attempting to do hey job, overreaching, and causing more harm than if she had done nothing.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/05/reddit-announces-sit...
On the other hand, much of the tech press is coordinated, spoonfed promotional material for the industry, where such a thing, even in a quoted endorsement, is arguably trading on the mark in a way which, absent a license, is a violation, and there are strong legal incentives for trademark holders to assume the worst of an unauthorized use without concrete evidence to the contrary.
Ars may have been in the right initially, but I think that the current article calling IMAX's response an absurd attemp at censorship is, at best, hyperbolic and wilfully blind to the realities around trademarks.
No, that's not what I'm saying. There's a big difference between press releases existing and presented-as-journalistic pieces being essentially paid promotional material for vendors.
> Do you actually think that position has a wooden leg to stand on?
No, which is why I didn't make it.
> I don't see how you could possibly read a comparison like this — even if made outside of quotes — as anything but descriptive of IMAX's actual product.
I don't see how you could read it as descriptive of IMAX's actual product, since there is no actual description of IMAX's product being made. Its clearly a nominative reference; its clearly a statement saying another product is good because its like IMAX's product.
> I don't think a normal consumer would likely be confused.
Perhaps not, but legal actions for violations of trademark rights don't always require that (infringement does, but dilution, which seems the most applicable trademark concern here, does not.)
And I do think that's a potential valid source of confusion with consumers, who could potentially think SteamVR lives up to the same image projection standards.
It's not as clear cut to me as Ars is making it out to be.
2. It was someone else who was describing something and likened this other thing to IMAX. Ars was quoting this person, not writing it themselves.
Don’t drag out the “confusion with consumers” thing – absolutely no-one would think that this thing actually was an IMAX™ – it was a comparison. Would I be sued by Coca-Cola if I said that “Pepsi is kind of like Coca-Cola”? Would I cause “confusion with consumers”? No. Trademark law does not mean that trademark owners can control every use of the word, despite what they (and apparently you) would wish for.
But that consumers could think it was IMAX certified or some such. That sort of thing is worth defending.
Making the leap from what was written in the article to "IMAX certified" is a hilariously wide leap. It's about two orders of magnitude too wide to justify the threat letter from IMAX.
For example, if IMAX's point of view is correct here, the entire article linked below[1] wouldn't be legal to write as it compares AMD's new GPUs to Nvidia's GPUs. Simply put, it's a staple of product journalism to compare with other similar technology, and this has always been the case. IMAX is clearly and wholly in the wrong.
It used to mean that, not any more. IMAX screens are allowed to be much, much smaller than before.
And that's because a trademark is exclusive rights over using the name for a commercial purpose. So the IMAX folks could make a product called IMAX-VR if they made a VR headset. But the Oculus folks, if they got some 8k phone screen, couldn't call it Oculus-IMAX without a licensing agreement, because IMAX owns the name IMAX with respect to product names.
But owning it with respect to product names doesn't mean you can prevent people from using it at all. How else would Coke (tm) be able to tell you in a commercial how much better they are than Pepsi (tm) as a result of some ridiculously staged "public tastings" where regular people prefer Coke (tm) to Pepsi (tm) three to one?
Anyone can refer to someone else's trademarked product name full stop. The only thing a trademark does is prevent other people from naming their products the same as, or confusingly similar to, the one which was trademarked first. And if someone thinks their new product name is different enough to be confusing the trademark holder still has to take them to court to prove it.
Nope. It was smaller than the unbranded "Monster Screen" at my local theater in the middle of nowhere.
IMAX no longer really means anything to me.
That "innovation" is >5 years old: http://www.bigscreen.com/journal.php?id=1505
We're left with Lincoln square in NYC and possibly New Rochelle, NY as the only remaining large format IMAX in the area.