Struggling photography company Eastman Kodak announced yesterday that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The company, which hopes to emerge from bankruptcy in 2013, said it has secured US$950 million in debtor-in-possession financing from Citigroup that will allow it to keep operating during restructuring. The company has also appointed Dominic DiNapoli, a vice chairman at FTI Consulting, as its chief restructuring officer. The firm has been advising Kodak on its finances since last year.
DiNapoli will have broad powers over the company's finances and operations as it looks for ways to raise funding to keep the company afloat during bankruptcy.
"Kodak is taking a significant step toward enabling our enterprise to complete its transformation," Antonio M. Perez, who will continue to serve as Kodak's CEO, said in a statement. "At the same time as we have created our digital business, we have also already effectively exited certain traditional operations, closing 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs and reducing our workforce by 47,000 since 2003. Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetising non-core IP assets."
Those intellectual property (IP) assets include a war chest of 1100 digital-imaging patents — crucial to cameras, phones and other devices — that it is looking to sell. The patents could be useful for companies looking to buy some legal protection.
In a bid to demonstrate some of that patent power, and collect licensing fees, Kodak recently filed lawsuits against smartphone makers HTC and Apple over camera technology. The lawsuits assert that Apple infringed on four Kodak patents and that HTC infringed on five.
In the midst of filing for bankruptcy, Kodak is keeping the patent courts busy with yet another lawsuit, this time against Samsung. Kodak is alleging violations of five patents related to digital imaging.
Filed in US District Court for the Western District of New York, the suit (PDF) claims that Samsung infringed on patents connected to such technologies as the ability to send an image from a digital camera, the ability to email images and the ability to send images over a cellular or Wi-Fi network.
The five specific patents in question are:
- US Patent No. 6,292,218 — "Electronic Camera For Initiating Capture of Still Images While Previewing Motion Images"
- US Patent No. 7,210,161 — "Automatically Transmitting Images from an Electronic Camera to a Service Provider Using a Network Configuration File"
- US Patent No. 7,742,084 — "Network Configuration File for Automatically Transmitting Images from an Electronic Still Camera"
- US Patent No. 7,453,605 — "Capturing Digital Images to be Transferred to an Email Address"
- US Patent No. 7,936,391 — "Digital Camera with Communications Interface for Selectively Transmitting Images over a Cellular Phone Network and a Wireless LAN Network to a Destination".
Kodak said that it has licensed its digital imaging patents to more than 30 tech companies, including LG, Motorola and Nokia, with all of those licences bearing royalties to Kodak.
By targeting Apple, HTC and Samsung, Kodak is specifically aiming at smartphone makers whose built-in cameras and photo apps rely on the various digital technologies named in the suits.
Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
You might be interested in:
But a spokesperson for Kodak sent ZDNet Australia's sister site CNET a statement from the company's president Laura Quatela. Though the statement was originally released in response to the Apple and HTC lawsuit, the company said that it applies to the Samsung case as well.
"Our primary interest is not to disrupt the availability of any product but to obtain fair compensation for the unauthorised use of our technology," Quatela said in the statement. "There's a basic issue of fairness that needs to be addressed. The failure of companies to appropriately compensate Kodak for the unauthorised use of our patented technology impedes our ability to continue to innovate and introduce new products."
Via CNET
Linkedin 
RSS Feeds 
Newsletters 
Alerts
