Japan court invalidates RED's key compressed RAW video patent

The Intellectual Property High Court in Tokyo has upheld the invalidation of a major Japanese patent belonging to RED, which covered compressed RAW video recording technology. The ruling follows a challenge by Panasonic and comes after Nikon acquired RED in 2024, inheriting the legal proceedings.

The contested patent, originally filed in 2008, describes a method for visually lossless compression of Bayer sensor data. The court determined that the claims lacked an inventive step and would have been obvious to a person skilled in the art based on existing technologies at the time.

For nearly two decades, this patent family shaped the cinema camera industry by influencing how manufacturers offered internal RAW recording and how they implemented specific codecs. The invalidation removes a long-standing legal barrier for manufacturers within the Japanese market.