Kodak sells $525M patent portfolio to consortiums led by Apple & Google

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Originally Posted by Athiril

This is just a measure against progress being made by others to block innovation and competition.

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Actually, since it is a large group buying the patents, it should stop a lot of the patent lawsuit silliness.

Who ever said they did not intend to keep core businesses?

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Originally Posted by DREW WILEY

And they've already repeatedly stated that they intend to retain actual mfg of those core product
lines we actually need. They still have a relatively strong presence in color neg film, TMax films,
and a variety of RA4 paper. Who gives a damn about amateur point n' shoots? They're not trying to
lose control at the manufacturing step itself. This is about marketing rights. I don't care how it's done as long as the quality remains. They turned over their chemisty a long time ago, and little has
changed except some odd pkg sizes. And they've already dropped E6 film. So no sense second guessing at this point in the game. If your nerves can't stand the anxiety do what I did, and stuff a
few years worth of film in your freezer. That's the only certainly you're gonna get at this point in time.

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I picked a good time to get into film photography. At least Ilford isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

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Originally Posted by Prof_Pixel

Actually, since it is a large group buying the patents, it should stop a lot of the patent lawsuit silliness.

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yep
the people that were being sued decided to buy instead
instagram, and telephone apps ... sounds like a match made in heaven ...

It appears that Kodak will survive a bit longer and they are still making film. All of those are good things. My poppa told me never to look a gift horse in the mouth so I am going to accept what is, and not look too hard at it.

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Originally Posted by PKM-25

Who ever said they did not intend to keep core businesses?

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Actually Dan, Kodak did. At least if one defines selling consumer film to still be a Kodak core business. From another earlier post (the link is still active):

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Originally Posted by Ken Nadvornick

...here's another pretty authoritative Kodak pronouncement (Kodak Continues Progress toward Emergence, 9/28/2012, 7th bullet point, my emphasis):

"Commencement of a process to sell the market-leading Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses, which are not core to Kodak’s future."

As we all know, Personalized Imaging is film imaging. Now I've used and loved Kodak products my entire life. But for the life of me I don't know how it can be stated any clearer than that. And this long term goal has been utterly consistent for the last five plus years.

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Sure, they may want to retain the film manufacturing step in house. But if they're not very interested in the selling of it, how much more interested will they be—in the long term—in the making of it. Kodak upper management has burned an awful lot of Kodak film customer bridges. I guess come March or so we'll see how well they can now swim.

For the record, this was not my preferred outcome. But also not too difficult to see it coming even a few years back. I really feel bad for those at Kodak whose loyalties still lie with analog.

Ken

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Originally Posted by ic-racer

I'm not sure about that, did anyone ever figure out if the film we use is "consumer" or "commercial?"

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Kodak classifies all of their black and white films as "Professional" films. Its actually been that way for a long time, before digital became popular, since the average consumer only shot color.

Maybe, maybe not, a sneak peak at the cog doesn't define the whole gear. More wait and see. When it happens it'll be like Efke, here, not here.

Personally, I decided a few years ago that I was tired of stressing over what Kodak is doing... I loved the BW infrared and I'm still sad it's gone, but now I just work at getting good results with something else. I'm going to keep shooting the Kodak films I like and move on to something else if/when they stop making it.

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Originally Posted by jnanian

yep
the people that were being sued decided to buy instead
instagram, and telephone apps ... sounds like a match made in heaven ...

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Yea and they (Instagram/IG) will lose all of their Instagram customers before January 16th if they don't change their new TOS(terms of service) agreement which gives them stock photo sales rights over any image you post...

So basically in theory they would become bigger than Getty... But every photographer I know is pulling out of IG if they don't update their TOS... They don't actually pay any of the image makers they just plan to sell the images as stock with no profit to the photographer... Shady... Good thing they didn't buy Kodak or they would probably claim rights to any images SHOT on Kodak products... Lol


~Stone

The Noteworthy Ones - Mamiya: 7 II, RZ67 Pro II / Canon: 1V, AE-1 / Kodak: No 1 Pocket Autographic, No 1A Pocket Autographic

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