[IP Encyclopedia] Selfie Stick a must-have item for social media is it actually invented in the 2010s?

Selfie Stick Mono pod [Photo provided = Wikipedia]

Patent Application : Selfie Stick (US4530580A)

Year : 1983

Nation : Japan

Region : Osaka

Name : Hiroshi Ueda (Minolta)

We are the Social media generation represented by Instagram and Facebook. We record sentimental pictures or videos every hour rather than long writings. Among those the development of social media has increased the number of selfies and there is an innovative device for ‘Taking pictures of themselves’ it is a Selfie stick’. In today’s IP Encyclopedia we are going to look into the patent history of selfie sticks an essential intellectual property in tourist spots.

Selfies are one of the essential pictures for modern people living in an ocean of social media. Selfies have become necessary to take pictures of themselves during travel or even in daily life for their social media profiles. It is called ‘selfie (a self-portrait photograph typically taken with a digital camera or smartphone)’ in English especially among young generation in abroad taking selfie is a boom.

Selfie sticks had been introduced in the early 2010s in Korea. However at that time it was used as an accessory for a digital camera so it was not popularly sold out. In addition the selfie sticks released at that time could not handle the heavy DSLR that was popular at that time and was used for attaching to compact cameras and the users were also negative.

In fact the popularity of selfie sticks in Korea has increased along with the development of cellular phones. In the middle of 2010s the camera with the weights that selfie sticks can handle had been introduced with the results of the function of switching the shooting directions better quality and improvement of shooting distance. It was not used popularly by many people even though some of people knew the usage of selfie sticks and used it however thanks to the experimental spirit of new filming technology in broadcasting industry it became well known to the public. Particularly since the celebrities started filming themselves in first-person in the entertainment shows it had been brought to the public. It was a sensational harmony of two shooting equipment.

There were about eight cases of the patent applications related to selfie sticks in Korea from 2011 to 2015. We can tell that it got a lot of attention in Korea compared with the number of the patent application related to selfie sticks in the US and Japan (13 cases and 15 cases in each country) in a decade from 2004 to 2013.

In 2014 the US conceded the craze of selfie sticks. The US magazine ‘Time’ selected selfie stick as one of the inventions of the year among 25 products. However several months later it turns out that it was a wrong choice. The selfie sticks which was popular in the 2010s was not the first invention but patented 30 years ago already.

According to the Korean Intellectual Property Office the first selfie stick was invented in 1983 by Japanese Hiroshi Ueda and the next year it was released to the public in Japan and it was registered in the US patent office in 1985. Ueda worked for the camera company Minolta in Japan in the 1980s and invented selfie sticks while on his vacation in Europe. The Hiroshi couple was visiting the Louvre Museum in Paris France and asked a boy to take a picture of them but the boy ran away with the camera. Since then he had been reluctant to ask to take pictures at any tourist spots so he invented an equipment for taking pictures with no help from others.

His invention was a technique of attaching a camera to the end of extensible stick. However due to the characteristic of a film camera it was impossible to check the result immediately so he tried to attach the mirror in front of the camera but it was inadequacy. Furthermore the cameras at the time were too heavy to be attached to the sticks and the pictures taken looking in the mirrors were not taken as they wanted. The invention which was too ahead of its time was silently faded away without any attention.

20 years later Ueda’s patent was expired and Wayne Fromm an employee of one of the Canadian toy companies invented selfie stick named ‘Quik pod’ and applied for a patent in 2005. Wayne also got an idea while asking for pictures on his vacation in Europe and he felt sure of the commercial success so promoted his selfie sticks in the exhibitions and home shopping. The following year he sold 1 million of his selfie sticks and made a big hit.

However he failed to get a patent in China and lost the Chinese market as ‘fake’ products sprang up. Since he recognized the importance of patents he is still suing the merchants selling similar products for copyright infringement in many other countries except China through his company Fromm Works.

As previously stated the patents of selfie sticks are scattered. It has been applied for patents with the ideas that anyone can easily come up such as adding useful functions that can be used in shooting. For examples of technology fusion a selfie stick with a holder which is adjustable the angles a selfie stick with image stabilization and a selfie stick with a remote control function including shutter focusing and zoom in and out are the well-known cases.

Recently the development of new type of selfie equipment is imminent such as wearable devices using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and the appearance of the devices combined with flight technique. Korea an IT leading country has the bright future of selfie equipment industry given that the smartphone penetration and the population of social media subscribers. It is expected that revolutionary intellectual property will be applied for a patent once the technology becomes suitable for the Fourth Industrial revolution and new ideas from daily life are fused.

Selfie Stick [Photo provided = ImageToday]

Patent of Selfie stick by Hiroshi Ueda [Photo provided = Google patents]

Photoshoot [Photo provided = ImageToday]

Selfie Stick Quik pod [Photo provided = Quik pod Official Website]

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