RED's compressed RAW patent fell in Japan. What happens next?

Japan's IP High Court has upheld the invalidation of RED's compressed RAW patent, rejecting Nikon's appeal. Here's what actually changes, and the other patent fights that could be coming.

On June 30, 2026, Japan's Intellectual Property High Court upheld the invalidation of RED's Japanese compressed RAW patent, rejecting an appeal from Nikon. This confirmed that patent JP 5231529, which has shaped who can offer internal RAW recording and at what cost for almost two decades, is dead in that jurisdiction.

The headlines tend to write themselves. Panasonic beat a patent that Sony and Apple couldn’t. And the irony that Nikon, now the owner of RED, ended up defending a patent that it had been challenged on by RED itself in the past is a delicious one. But the more interesting story is what happens next.

What changes now

RED's compressed RAW patents have effectively set the terms of internal RAW recording industry-wide since the early 2010s. Sony fought RED over the same claims in 2013 and lost, leaving the patent intact. Apple challenged the patent's validity later and also lost.

Other companies have taken different approaches. Atomos licenses the technology so ProRes RAW can run on its external recorders, while Blackmagic and Z CAM took a different route to avoid paying a license, partially debayering sensor data before compression in BRAW and ZRAW respectively.

The truth is that not much changes now. This ruling applies to a single Japanese patent and doesn't touch RED and Nikon's patent family in the US or elsewhere. Nobody’s camera firmware changes because of this ruling, and nobody should expect an internal-RAW feature to suddenly appear on an existing body.

Panasonic already ships internal compressed RAW. ProRes RAW has been on the LUMIX GH7 since 2024 and followed on the S1RII and S1II, presumably under whatever licensing arrangement RED's patent required. The ruling means lower costs and fewer constraints on a capability it already had in its home market, and that’s that.

It’s important to remember too that the ruling stops firmly at the border. RED's US patent already survived a direct validity challenge from Apple back in 2019 and is untouched by anything that happened in Tokyo. But, that said, the specific argument the Japanese judgment relied on is now public. Any manufacturer or challenger wondering whether to pursue a similar case in the US or Europe no longer has to do the spadework to build an argument from scratch.

What changes in the future

Nikon could, of course, appeal the decision, but history shows such appeals rarely succeed as they are restricted to points of law alone. And, in some ways, this is a storm in a teacup. The Japanese legal action has gone on so long that the patent was due to expire on its own terms on April 11, 2028 anyway. Nikon’s recent financial results for the quarter that included the ruling list only two matters under contingent liabilities, a long-running Indian customs dispute and an internal investigation at its Optos subsidiary. The RED patent case isn't mentioned, and the filing states plainly that no other case is expected to have a significant impact on the company's results. Perhaps if similar challenges start appearing in other markets that might change.

But this is not RED and Nikon's last word on the subject.

Records show a considerably newer US patent, filed in 2021 by RED founder James Jannard, RED chief executive Jarred Land, and engineer Manjunath Subray Bhat, that generalises the same compressed RAW approach well beyond cinema cameras and extends it into phones, tablets and other small devices.

This isn’t due to expire until July 2038. Nikon Corporation took direct ownership of it in October 2025 with the RED purchase, and it's the head of what is termed an “active continuation family” with at least two further US patents behind it. Whether any of that family has a Japanese counterpart, and whether it would survive the same legal arguments against it, isn't publicly known. It could be, though, that the fight over compressed RAW has simply shifted to newer ground.