Earlier this week, a US court dismissed Apple’s challenge to RED’s main RAW video patent, allowing RED to maintain some control over Apple’s ProRes RAW codec.
Earlier in May, Apple quietly filed a legal petition to try and invalidate one of RED’s most important patents: the REDCODE codec for capturing visually lossless compressed RAW video.
Apple’s argument was that RED’s patent was a “logical combination” of two prior inventions, making the technology unpatentable. If Apple had succeeded in proving this point, it might have saved the company from having to pay RED royalties on ProRes RAW and allowed camera companies to more readily adopt the codec; as it stands, anybody who wants to use ProRes RAW needs to strike a deal with RED, because the codec uses the same compression technology described in RED’s original patent.
RED responded to the petition in August, filing in-depth responses from RED president Jarrad Land, recently-retired founder Jim Jannard, and the inventor of REDCODE Graeme Nattress defending the novelty of this key patent.
The companies went back and forth a couple of more times since then, but on November 8th, the patent office officially denied Apple’s petition, writing that Apple “has not shown a reasonable likelihood that it would prevail in establishing that any of the challenged claims 1–30 are unpatentable.”
In response to the court’s ruling, RED president Jarred Land praised the decision before quickly reiterating that Apple and RED have a very positive working relationship, framing this little dispute as “all part of the process of defining how we work together in the future.”
