Opinion: A Lament for the Photo Album

THERE was a time when you’d come back from Spain, or even just the Jersey Shore, with a couple of rolls of film tucked safely into your toiletry bag. A few days later, you’d find yourself in line at the photo desk of your local pharmacy, waiting to retrieve your developed images with a sense of nervous anticipation.

It took willpower to make it onto the sidewalk without sneaking a peek inside the envelope. Invariably, half of the pictures were out of focus. Sometimes, you’d find that your head had been cut off. But typically there would be at least one fantastic shot as well, with all of you looking radiant and spontaneous, and a few more than that would be passable. For your efforts, you’d come away with something with which to fill a few pages of an album, with enough room left over to add the occasional matchbook front or dried flower.

The digital photography revolution roughly coincided with the births of my two daughters, now ages 4 and 6. Finally, I had something to immortalize in an album besides my dysfunctional romantic life. And so I immortalized — and then some. No event seemed too trivial to capture. When they dressed up in tutus and swim goggles just to be silly, when they danced suggestively to Miley Cyrus, I felt compelled to capture the image for posterity’s sake.

For a while, I kept up with the sorting, naming, uploading and ordering (and editing of) prints. The albums featuring my daughters as newborns are both masterpieces of discernment. It was some time in 2009 that I fell behind, then so far behind that I nearly stopped taking pictures of them, since the very thought of new images of their grinning punims became synonymous in my mind with hard labor. Indeed, for my past efforts, I now had a hard drive filled with hundreds if not thousands of photo files that I lacked the energy to go through. Never mind to look at again. On my bimonthly to-do lists, along with “Clean out basement” and “Write thank-you note to Mom’s best friend for educational toys received a year ago, Christmas,” I now found myself adding, “Deal with photo nightmare.”

The years passed. Digital photography and I were at a stalemate until October, when my dad died. It wasn’t unexpected, but it still shocked me in a way that only the child of a deceased parent can understand. I simply could not believe that he was gone from this earth — that he’d never totter up the front steps of my house again, as he did every other Sunday, and hook his cane around the interior knob of the front door.

I couldn’t believe I’d never see his face again either, even if the blank and gaunt one that I witnessed at the end bore almost no resemblance to the quietly beaming Dad I’d known in the family, or the quietly intense one I’d see practicing, teaching or onstage. (He was a cellist.) The loss of my father and the resulting disorientation made me crave paper photos in a way I hadn’t in years, especially ones of him before Parkinson’s disease stole his last facial expression. They were no substitute for the man, but at least they could be touched and held — and beheld — unlike my father, who was now unreachable and unable to be seen.

I found I wanted hard copies of my still-living family members, too — concrete facts to counteract the sensation of sloshing sea beneath my feet. My mother must have felt the same way. The morning after my father died, she got out her old albums from the 1970s and early ’80s — fat, crepitating affairs with gilded vinyl covers in turquoise and maroon, featuring page after page of fading Kodak snapshots of the family that she and my dad had raised together.

Here, undeniably, was our family’s past, dated by year, and laid out for all the world to see: our holidays in Cape Cod, Canada and Vermont; our house exchanges to Twickenham, England, and Lausanne, Switzerland; our circuitous drives to Wisconsin to see my dad’s cousin who owned a dairy farm; our Thanksgiving dinners and concerts, birthdays and graduations. The setbacks and sadness, anger and boredom that mark any human existence were nowhere in evidence, but that was O.K. It was still a record of my dad’s and our lives: my sisters learning how to horseback-ride; my hideous Dorothy Hamill haircut; my dad chasing down a ball on a tennis court. I’d never been so thankful for the diligent organizer that my mother has always been.

Lucinda Rosenfeld is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Pretty One.”

Bits Blog: In the High-Tech Patent Wars, an Inventor's Lament

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Stephen G. Perlman worked at Apple in the 1980s. Today, he runs a start-up incubator called Rearden in San Francisco, and he says that patents are crucial to his business.

A long, narrative article we ran last week on the challenges facing the patent system, “The Patent, Used as a Sword,” prompted a lot of comments, and we posted more than 275 of them.

But I thought it might be worthwhile to present one more — an extended commentary from one of the sources who made a cameo appearance in the piece, Stephen G. Perlman. In the article, Mr. Perlman was a counterpoint to the main focus of the piece, which was big companies using patents as tools and weapons in the smartphone patent wars. (What he says below comes from both earlier interviews, and a lengthy e-mail he sent after the article ran.)

Mr. Perlman is a successful inventor and entrepreneur. He helped design Apple’s Quicktime multimedia software. Over the years, his start-up ventures have ranged from WebTV, for bringing Internet services to television (sold to Microsoft in 1997 for $425 million), to Mova, for producing extraordinarily detailed computer-generated facial imagery like the reverse-aging of Brad Pitt’s face in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which won an Academy Award.

The latest creation of his San Francisco invention factory, Rearden, is a technology called DIDO, which Mr. Perlman thinks promises a breakthrough in wireless communications — speeds of more than 100 times faster than current cell networks, without the need for cell towers.

Mr. Perlman holds about 100 granted patents with roughly the same number of applications pending. He knows what each patent does, and has never sold one. “It’s a very different breed of patent,” he said, “than we’re seeing with the clash of the smartphone titans, with truckloads of patents for minor sub-features being bought and sold like commodities.”

“There are patents, and then there are fundamental patents,” he added. “In my world, we deal with fundamental patents.”

The different breeds of patents, according to Mr. Perlman, reflect different kinds of innovation. Most innovation is incremental, he says. “Incrementalism is 99 percent of what corporate research and development does,” Mr. Perlman said, adding:  ”Heavens, that is not to say it isn’t vitally important. Where would we be without it.”

What Mr. Perlman labels incrementalism is what others call integrated innovation. By that, they mean that increasingly complex products, like smartphones, are triumphs of melding many different technologies — each, to be sure, a smallish step rather than breakthrough.

Again, Mr. Perlman does not belittle the incremental path. Speaking of smartphones, he said, “Man, it’s incredible what they’ve done.”

But, Mr. Perlman wrote in an e-mail: “The problem is that fundamental patents are lumped together with incremental patents. And, as the world is trying to mitigate the over-litigation of incremental patents and patent offices are buried under them, little guys like us are just being steamrolled over. And it’s not accidental steamrolling.”

“Incumbents with a deep vested interest in maintaining the status quo,” he continued, “see the screwed-up patent system as a means to disrupt our ability to bring breakthroughs to market.”

That kind of big-company gamesmanship played a role, Mr. Perlman suggests, in the recent bankruptcy of one of his start-ups, OnLive. The company had developed a wireless streaming technology for delivering online games and office productivity applications to tablet computers, with photo-realistic images and high-speed performance. In a review earlier this year, David Pogue of The Times called OnLive “jaw-dropping, extremely polished technology.”

Part of the problem for OnLive, Mr. Perlman said, was that it was five years before government patent examiners looked at the application for its basic patent — and three years more before it was granted. All the while, Mr. Perlman said, OnLive could not enforce its patent or use its patent asset to help raise further funding.

In August, OnLive went through a form of bankruptcy, called assignment for the benefit of creditors, and shareholders including Mr. Perlman lost their investment and employees were laid off. The OnLive service continues to operate.