An interesting article

[TechBill]

Here an interesting article

Be careful where you point those doorbell security cameras

At the end of article you will notice where it says:

The Ring company, which has a video doorbell, recently filed a patent to put its facial recognition identification software into the doorbells. This would flag suspicious people. No word yet when that will happen.


I would think that you can’t really file patent on something generic like this feature unless it to protect its own codes.

 

[tangent]

The nest doorbell can already do facial rec.

 

[mat200]

..
I would think that you can’t really file patent on something generic like this feature ...

FYI - there is a lot of stupid patent stuff and abuse of the patent system.

 

[CCTVCam]

Just needs someone to challenge it if it's general in nature.

Patents need to be unique and I believe something can't be patented if the patented subject was in public use before the date of the patent:

General information concerning patents

I would have thought it would be fair to say that given the decades of CCTV, someone has put a camera above a doorway before and more recently when facial recognition tech came out, fitted it with such software. So far as door bell cams are concerned if the claims are specific to those, I would highly doubt that no-one has fitted a doorbell cam with facial recognition software before given there have been some that can be fitted to an NVR for some time now including one or two pro systems.

As for their own software, that's more claimable I would have thought if it has unique code or features.

 

[samplenhold]

Patents are funny things. I worked as a geophysicist in the oil industry for over 35 years. Back in the 1980's a different oil company than the one I worked for received a patent for a signal processing process which was taking the second derivative of a time-series signal. Most of us in the industry laughed at that. Just about every company had their own seismic processing apps that did this. Of course, all kept their process proprietary so no one else would know. Company lawyers debated what should be done, sue against the patent, cease using our own version, or ignore it. Most thought they could win the suit but that would expose the proprietary apps to the rest of industry.

Obviously they got that patent because the reviewers in the patent office did not know much about signal processing or the math behind it. Otherwise they never would have given the patent on a mathematical calculation that has been around forever. Kind of like patenting addition or subtraction. We joked how we would write a patent request for the square root. I retired a few years ago and as far as I know, they still hold that patent.