Unexpected right holder of basic patent of drone light show (Kiyoshi Kurihara) --Individual --Yahoo! News

At the opening ceremony of the Olympics, which was not very well received overall, one of the highly acclaimed performances would have been the aerial display of the Olympic emblem by drone. Some people wrote on SNS that "Japanese technology is amazing" (I thought so for a moment), but that is a service provided by Intel for the general public, and money and image data. It will be done if you just give it to me, and it has already been used in the Pyeongchang Olympics and the Super Bowl, so "Japanese technology" had nothing to do with it.

Now, I looked into the light show-related patents realized by controlling a large number of drones equipped with such lighting. For easy prediction, Intel has recently filed a number of patents in this area (I'll cover it in a separate article), but when you look at its review progress, it says, "A light show with a drone. We come across a basic patent that allows us to obtain rights to the idea of ​​"" almost as it is.

That is the "Aerial Display System with Floating Pixels" (US8,862,285), whose rights are owned by Disney (Disney Enterprises Inc), which is surprisingly surprising and not surprising. The filing date is February 15, 2013 and the registration date is October 14, 2014. The main claim is effectively a one-off patent decision, which is a fairly wide range of patents (details will be explained in the paid part). Probably patented only in the US (at least not in Japan). (Addition: The world's first drone light show seems to be held by an organization called Ars Electronica Futurelab in Austria in September 2012, so in any case, it could only be patented in the United States, which was pre-inventionist at the time. It seems.)

I think it's inevitable that this patent will be in conflict with a drone light show in the United States, but how is Intel dealing with it? Disney is collaborating with Intel on a drone show at Disney World (Disney can't really make its own drones, so you'll have to collaborate with a technology vendor), so maybe Disney is with Intel. I think I'm licensing the patent under a friendly relationship with (I couldn't find any specific information about the patent license).

By the way, most of the time ago, I wrote an article that "Disney's powerful drone patent was established in a blink of an eye", but the patent (8,876,571) for operating a giant puppet introduced there with a drone also has the same filing date. (February 15, 2013). Disney has also applied for several other basic entertainment-related patents using drones on this day (I will introduce them in a separate article). It can be said that he has won a fairly advantageous position in the intellectual property of a large-scale entertainment show utilizing drones.

Let's take a look at the specific contents of US8,862,285.