Canon Tops Among Japanese Companies in U.S. Patent Rankings for Eleven Years Running

[3kramd5]

Protectionism only lasts so long. It isn't good for the consumer (Zeiss not bothering to add AF to Canikon lenses, Sigma lenses not focusing properly, etc). But it isn't in the long term interest of the company either.

what the heck are you smoking?

patents are issued to protect your rights to create and market a product with particular characteristics as defined by the patent.

if canon doesn't patent it, and someone else does even AFTER the fact because of the US patent laws - canon would be libel for damages.

Canon has entered into agreements to share patent porfolios with various companies in the past.

but claiming that patent issuance is nothing more than protectionism is completely not understanding how the world works outside of your mom's basement.

whether canon enters into joint development agreements or shares technology and research is entirely immaterial to the publication and submission of a patent.

Couldn't be stated better

I dunno, liable could have been spelled correctly

 

[jeffa4444]

Protectionism only lasts so long. It isn't good for the consumer (Zeiss not bothering to add AF to Canikon lenses, Sigma lenses not focusing properly, etc). But it isn't in the long term interest of the company either.

Japan is increasingly a protectionist society, but this is only a temporary way to stop competition, it is always self-destructive in the end.

You can actually see it hurting Canon, Sony and Leica are working WITH Zeiss, not AGAINST them. As a result, their cameras have great AF zeiss lenses. Canon has no AF zeiss lenses.

Same with the sensor tech, Leica is working WITH CMOSIS, not AGAINST them, as a result, Leica have good dynamic range, Canon does not.

Shutting yourself off from the competition with patents and crawling into the corner in fetus position, afraid you will actually have to compete, afraid someone might actually have a working AF lens for your camera, is ultimately self-defeating.

EVERY country including the US has a measure of protectionism, France blocked the sale of Danone a dairy products company to Pesico because it was not in the national interest, the US blocked the sale of LA ports because of "homeland security" I could give you examples all day long. The Chinese are far more protectionist than Japan and so is Brazil the least protectionist country in the West is the UK where over 60% of business is foriegn owned.
Canon protect IP, IP they researched but any patent is only as good as your defence lawyers ask Apple & Samsung. Its also easier to gain a patent in the US than Europe.

 

[Maximilian]

Shutting yourself off from the competition with patents and crawling into the corner in fetus position, afraid you will actually have to compete, afraid someone might actually have a working AF lens for your camera, is ultimately self-defeating.

Let's see...11 years and counting as a leader in patents granted, and the dSLR market leader for 11 years and counting.

So yeah, what you say is totally logical and Canon clearly doesn't know what they're doing. : :

The only reason Canon is the sales leader is they have had more money for marketing and so forth, stupid people think Canon is awesome even though they are often not.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid me.
Oh I am so much a victim of marketing I still can't get it.
And you're right. The 99% of the people are the stupid lemmings only following Canon marketing because that is the only thing the others don't do well.
[/sarc off]
Meh!
coreyhkh, the only reason canon is still the the sales leader is that they understand the market and therefore make products that fit to that (main) market and do good PR for those products as well - at least better than you think.

 

[Don Haines]

Protectionism only lasts so long. It isn't good for the consumer (Zeiss not bothering to add AF to Canikon lenses, Sigma lenses not focusing properly, etc). But it isn't in the long term interest of the company either.

Do you understand how elements are driven in lenses?

To grossly simplify things, this is how things work....

The autofocus system determines that the lens needs to be moved X AF units in a particular direction to achieve focus.

If you know all the characteristics of the lens (how much lens movement equals an AF unit, how quickly the lens element accelerates, how quickly the element decelerates) then you can calculate the necessary values to accelerate the lens element until it is time to decelerate it so that it stops in the focused position.... once you get there, you check focus again and re-adjust if necessary.

If you do not know these characteristics, then you have to make guesses... and as a result you do not hit the optimum values and you take more iterations of the process to achieve focus.

Canon knows the values for their lenses so when you put a Canon lens on a Canon body, it has the data to optimize the process. They do not know these values for other manufacturers lenses and as a result, focus is slower. The process is not secret..... companies like Tamron know the protocol and know the codes so they choose to report the one closest to their lens's capabilities. It is not exact, but the result is far better than "move it a bit, check, move it a bit, check, move it a bit, check (repeated hundreds of times) and you end up with ten second focus times.

Same with Nikon.......

Same with Sony......

And the final sanity check is that if there really was a conspiracy by Canon to not work with other lenses, THEN IT WOULD NOT WORK WITH OTHER LENSES!!!!! And if they did that, they would be known for such chicanery and Canon sales would plummet.....

 

[chanceslost]

I don't sense any doom and gloom in my photographic future.

That's obviously because you're not using a sensor with "over 14 stops of DR", and you're preserving highlights. All the gloom is lost in the shadow noise. ;D

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I've watched the number of patents awarded to Canon increase every year, and was wondering how a company manages them when they average over 10 a day. Just keeping track of them and which ones go into a product seems like a big job.

Obviously, they break them down into categories, but there is also crossover. And, the figures are for US patents, They have more Japanese patents than US patents.

 

[rrcphoto]

I've watched the number of patents awarded to Canon increase every year, and was wondering how a company manages them when they average over 10 a day. Just keeping track of them and which ones go into a product seems like a big job.

Obviously, they break them down into categories, but there is also crossover. And, the figures are for US patents, They have more Japanese patents than US patents.

because of patent law changes in the united states, it actually makes more sense to get as many into the US patent system as possible.

the number of patent applications canon does is staggering.

as far as the patents and what goes into a camera, and what is defensible and what is unusable - there's lawyers on staff especially for that.

canon got nailed and is still fighting as well some legal battles by patent trolls - which aarefar more of a bane to innovation than getting a patent published would ever be.