Kodak refuses to go away quietly, sues Samsung over five patents

Two weeks ago, we reported that Kodak was looking into filing for bankruptcy if it couldn’t sell off enough of its patents. Kodak licenses some these to companies like LG, Motorola, and Nokia. A week after that report, Kodak sued both Apple and HTC for infringing on some of those patents.

Today, the company is adding Samsung to the list of those being sued for patent infringement. The lawsuit singles out Samsung tablets specifically for using some of its technology without asking. The patents that Kodak says Samsung is using without permission center around the automatic handling of photos, such as sending them through email. Here are the five in question:

U.S. Patent No. 6,292,218 – “Electronic Camera For Initiating Capture of Still Images While Previewing Motion Images”
U.S. Patent No. 7,210,161 – “Automatically Transmitting Images from an Electronic Camera to a Service Provider Using a Network Configuration File”
U.S. Patent No. 7,742,084 – “Network Configuration File for Automatically Transmitting Images from an Electronic Still Camera”
U.S. Patent No. 7,453,605 – “Capturing Digital Images to be Transferred to an E-Mail Address”
U.S. 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”

It appears that these patents involving the transmission of photos are the same ones the company is suing Apple and HTC over. Before it sells off its patents or files for bankruptcy, the company must defend its assets, and the company certainly isn’t being quiet about it. As our own Brad McCarty points out, Kodak has become a dinosaur in digital photography, since it hasn’t executed on its own social offerings:

Kodak has been touting its social sharing functions for the past couple of years and the idea behind them is good. However, the implementation is simply incomplete. Instead of having a one-touch share button that allowed you to directly upload to Facebook, that button allows you to flag a picture. Then you have to hook up your camera to your computer, use Kodak’s software and finally upload it to the service of your choice.

If Kodak is going down, it certainly isn’t going down quietly. However, it looks like most of the damage to the company was self-inflicted.