Who Owns Film Recipes?

[Lachlan Young]

Witness the considerable interest on Photrio in Panatomic X. People sometimes miss films when they're gone.

A lot of that also has to do with people believing that they know more about the materials than they actually do. Dunning-Kruger effect in essence.

 

[removed account4]

when i was a student i used to love to shoot 100 foot rolls of pan x, i had a vague idea what i was doing, and i enjoyed the film.
now many years later i don't use pan x, i have no idea what i am doing and i am still enjoying the ride !
i figure panatomic x is a mile marker on the side of the road.
every time i think i know something about photography, another layer is peeled back and i realize there is more
to it, all of it
have fun!

 

[AgX]

drew:

you don't need to be a PHd sleuth or chemistry wizard to make photographic emulsions ..
if you go to denise's website or look at her books you will see.
it is pretty simple ...

In the photochemical industry over here they all had a PhD.

 

[removed account4]

In the photochemical industry over here they all had a PhD.

right, im not saying to work in the industry for a large (or small) company you don't or they didn't.. im saying YOU don't need
a phD, and you don't need to be a wizard at chemistry or a photochemistry expert to mix a few ingredients together
and make your own photo emulsion. its like saying you need a PHd to mix the 2 chemicals together that make
the classic cyanotype formula ... its not very difficult and its a lot of fun...

 

[Photo Engineer]

There are patents and secrets. Lets look at these. Patents are published to prevent or bar others using your R&D. Secrets are so closely held that they are never disclosed. So, they do not appear in patents. I know that Kodak had both.

PE

 

[RalphLambrecht]

There are patents and secrets. Lets look at these. Patents are published to prevent or bar others using your R&D. Secrets are so closely held that they are never disclosed. So, they do not appear in patents. I know that Kodak had both.

PE

I worked in the automotive industry for 4 decades and we were actually discouraged by corporate lawyers to file for patents because, that would mean to publish the details of our work; keeping it a secret can be a much better protection.

 

[Nodda Duma]

It’s similar in optics for devices and technologies but a bit more extreme for actual optical prescriptions .. in fact, patenting a lens design is how ray benders share design innovations since it’s so ludicrously easy to get around an optical design patent (tweak the focal length, radii of curvature, glasstypes..done). The main CAD programs (Code V, Zemax) compile all the prescriptions in the patents into a database for lens designers to use as a starting point when making new designs.

 

[mgb74]

One advantage of a patent is that you can sue a competitor for patent infringement. You don't even have to be right, you just need to be willing to spend more on attorney's than your competitor is willing to spend. (Hyperbole, but only a slight bit.)

 

[FredK]

Many very good answers here but several that are not included that are very important are that film chemistries have changed through time to eliminate harmful items like
Formaldehyde and other things more recently reported to be concern to ones health. Another is the present technologies used to both manufacture emulsions and dispersions and then emulsion coat those layers can not replicate the films of the past which used less accurate control systems for bead coating, or worse, skim pan trough coating.

 

[Luckless]

Also keep in mind that a big part of what makes a film work the way it does lies in crystal formations, which is a time and condition based process rather than an ingredients based process, and the whole thing can be very difficult to scale across different volumes.

If a patent or recipe calls for combining A + B + C to achieve X, then it is entirely possible to add those three things together and get something radically different from X. Things like combination rate, temperature, and even pressure and relative humidity levels can have a noticeable impact. And that is before considering scaling for chemistry volume.

Even if you can work out a way to take all the listed chemicals and combine them in a tiny 10ml sample batch to experiment with till you find the exact properties you're looking for out of the material, it is may not be reliably reproduced if you take your procedure and up it to a 100ml batch, let alone going to a few litres for small industrial coating production.