History
IBM originally developed and patented infrared cleaning, and subsequently licensed this patent to Applied Science Fiction (ASF). Canon has a patent cross-licensing agreement with IBM and was able to use the IBM's infrared cleaning patent. Canon couldn't use the trademarked Digital ICE name, so instead calls it Film Automatic Retouching and Enhancement (FARE). Other companies, like Hamrick Software and LaserSoft Imaging, independently developed infrared cleaning algorithms which are completely different from IBM's patented algorithm.
ASF subsequently went out of business, having spent all their money trying to develop dry film development in a kiosk when film sales significantly dropped. Kodak purchased the assets of ASF, but hasn't done anything with any of ASF's technologies.
Read more about this topic: Infrared Cleaning
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)