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ISO Could Withdraw JPEG Standard
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jul 23, 2002 01:25 PM
from the thanks-forgent-have-a-nice-day dept.
from the thanks-forgent-have-a-nice-day dept.
McSpew writes "According to The Register, the ISO is prepared to withdraw JPEG as a standard if Forgent Networks continues to assert its patent claims over JPEG's compression algorithm." I'm sure the JPEG committee would still be happy to hear of prior art.
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Oh NO!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Selling feature (Score:2, Funny)
"Our women are 100% patent-free!"
-Matt
Oh, please... (Score:2)
Maybe this would be a way to stop this patent / Intellectual Property nightmare once and for all.
What about patents not applying if the implementation is open source and not-for-profit?
Well, I guess I can keep on dreaming... =(
Re:Oh, please... (Score:4, Interesting)
The only thing that could improve the situation is that the MPAA find that patents are beginning to eat into their profits, and get their pet senators into action
Parent
Re:Oh, please... (Score:3, Interesting)
That remains to be seen.
It is far from clear that a party may legally make a demand for payment on the basis of a spurious IP claim.
The claim that a party has paid $15 million to buy a patent license sounds very fishy to me. It is considerably greater than would normally be paid in that situation.
There is certainly a claim to be fought in the courts. The various manufacturers who have been targetted by begging letters from Forgent are likely to have many legal defenses. It is highly unlikely that a case will be heard before the patent expires in 2004 however.
ISO shouldn't fight fights (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh, please... (Score:5, Informative)
Am I the only one who thinks the ISO should stand up and fight the good fight?
It isn't in any way ISO's job to fight patents.
The JPEG people (remember, JPEG is the Joint Photograpphic Experts Group, not just a compression standard) are the ones who will fight the good fight--them and their members. JPEG itself can only do inexpensive things, and probably couldn't force a lawsuit even if they had the money. What they can do is organize their members (who do have money) into working together in the pursuit of evidence that the patent claims are invalid. which is what they are doing [jpeg.org].
What about patents not applying if the implementation is open source and not-for-profit?
There is a relatively new area of law, equitable estopple (spelling? eh, IANAL, so don't need to write it), which covers this. In this situation it more or less says that given that the owners of the patent knew (or should have known) that their tech was being incorporated into a free standard, they should have spoken up then, and can't now. Letting someone incorporate your IP into a standard, and letting them believe that they hadn't, is a no-no. Refusing to let them use it is OK, but you have to speak up quickly.
Additionally, there is the defense of laches, which more generally covers not enforcing a patent for a long time. If, given you had been reasonably diligent, you would have been aware of infringement (or you actually were aware), and you do nothing for a long time (6 years is the standard, more or less by situation), then you forfeit your enforcement rights for past infringement. A quote I saw on it went like "Those who sleep on their rights can't expect to exercise them."
Parent
Finally... (Score:2, Insightful)
My proposition (Score:4, Funny)
This is a Good Thing(tm) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a Good Thing(tm) (Score:5, Insightful)
So no, whining isn't a bad thing, because, if one year down the road our social collective asserts that JPEGs time has come due to the groundword of people expressing dissatisfaction with it now, it will be much easier to move to something else in one fell swoop.
Being a martyr can be useful, but more often its useless. Education takes time, but our actions are far more effective once everybody is on the same page.
Parent
Re:This is a Good Thing(tm) (Score:5, Interesting)
Whining is a bad thing, because habitual complaints put the attention of the complainers, not the problem itself. 1,000 posts noting the state of the patent system, corporate greed and a lack of ethics in modern society will not get us royalty-free jpegs, end microsoft's desktop monopoly, cause the RIAA to support P2P, cause the MPAA to support transferable digital video content, allow musicians to get paid, prevent violations of the GPL or give you a way to overclock your Celeron 300 to be faster than a daul Athlon MP 2100+.
On the other hand, discussions about possible solutions for each issue, methods to educate the public about the problem and methods to enact action at a local level can make a difference. Perhaps somebody here works for a corporation of sufficient size and influence to get proper PNG support in the next version of IE. Perhaps somebody here has been thinking about implementing support for another graphics format in mozilla, and might be driven to take that step.
It's impossible to know what could be accomplished if slashdot attempted to direct the energy it spends mindlessly whining at analyzing the problems the community has identified, and analyzing possible solutions.
Whining on slashdot is masturbation, it may be fun but it doesn't change anything. Pretending otherwise is as unrealistic as my hope that this post may inspire a rational discussion as to what the realistic remedies to this situation are, and what the full impact of this situation really is.
After all, perhaps somebody could talk to these folks and get them to license the patent for free to open source software, thus garnering good will, and they could then just milk the PhotoShops and such of the world.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Parent
Re:This is a Good Thing(tm) (Score:3, Informative)
First, PNG is no alternative for JPEG since JPEG, being lossy, compresses much better (which is needed for certain applications such as photography).
Second, you cannot expect the whole world to switch away from very widely used protocols/standards each time some company claims to hold some patent.
If anything, this issue shows how bad, dangerous, damaging software patents are. They cause lots of economic damage, and could lead to illogical behaviour (it is illogical to launch an enormous migration effort for such reasons) wasting lots of money and human resources. It is very good that ISO makes a point here. That has nothing to do with a so called slashdot mentality (as if ISO would suffer from such).
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just about your personal preference (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not just about your personal preference (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
premature? (Score:2, Interesting)
In addition, what is the point of doing it now? AFIK there were legal limits on enforcing your patent after you let people adopt it.
Personally, i have nothing against patents but this does seem rather silly.
libjpeg? Linux distros? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's clear that Forgent is going after companies that develop browsers, sell image editing tools, etc., but on your typical Unix/Linux platform these tools often are "just" linked to libjpeg where the real encoding and decoding is done. In this case might they try to go after anyone whose name appears in the libjpeg sources? Ack!
This could just mean... (Score:2)
Too bad this patent covers the whole spectrum of compressing images by removing redundant data.
Re:This could just mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
A search on patents using "image AND compression" at the US Patent office returned 21314 hits for 1996 through 2002, 6592 from 1991 through 1995, and 3741 from 1986 through 1990. That's a total of 31647 patents in 12 years.
Are you trying to tell me that there is nothing in the Jpeg 2000 specification that couldn't be shoehorned to fit within one of these 31 thousand patents given a sufficiently unscrupulous company and a technically clueless judge???
Parent
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Too late. (Score:5, Interesting)
I want this patent invalidated, then the companies that paid money to go after them for fraud.
My camera uses .jpgs... am I personally liable? (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly what happens if the patent is upheld? Am I personally liable? In theory, could Forgent come after me for royalties?
What happens if you buy and use a product that later on turns out to infringe on someone's patent?
Offhand I don't recall any language in any fine print anywhere that says I'm held harmless, it's all the vendor's fault.
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
What is it with you PNG fanatics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, the issue at stake here is not just about whether or not JPGs can or cannot be used; if Forgent gets away with this, the door is open for all other companies to get away with submerging their patents and then springing royalties onto us. GIFs have been taken from us, and now it looks as if JPGs will be taken from us as well, and I don't think that it's a good idea to rely on just one picture format. I'd rather have choice, thanks very much.
Prior Art For What? (Score:5, Interesting)
One would hope they'd just fight this nusance lawsuit in court.
Re:Prior Art For What? (Score:5, Informative)
They're claiming that the lossless table-based huffman coding that JPEG does *after* the DCT and quantization steps is covered by their lossless table-based huffman/RLE coding.
Not that this makes their claim valid--there is likely prior art for such use of Huffman codes, and the original patent holder was a member of JPEG in the late 80's, and therefore obligated to mention their patent then.
Please stop saying that the patent has nothing to do with JPEG. If rather than reading the crappy html claims, you read the full TIFF version, it becomes clear that their patent is somewhat relevant to JPEG. The more interesting stuff in the patent isn't applicable to JPEG, but the lossless transform they use is.
Parent
Re:Prior Art For What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Lossless JPEG is a very unusual beast, and didn't get finalized until much later than lossy JPEG. It works according to much different principles.
Lossy JPEG transform the data such that you can easily throw away unimportant parts, and then runs a lossless coder to shrink it. By removing the unimportant parts, you make lossless coding step very efficient. Lossless JPEG tries to predict what the picture will be based off of earlier pixels. Since the predictions are usually close, you can then use fairly few bits to store the difference between the prediction and actuallity, thereby saving space, although not nearly as much as lossy.
The claims verses standard JPEG are shaky. I'd think that the claims verses lossless are much shakier.
Either way, looking for prior art in the form of old JPEGs is a waste of time. The publication of the spec itself would constitute prior art, except that it isn't old enough. And prior to the spec, there were no JPEGs. So no old JPEGs are old enough.
If you do want a replacement for lossless JPEG, JPEG2000 is quite good. In lossy mode it doesn't have nearly the problems with artifacting that JPEG does. Rather than get blocky, images tend to become progressively blurier. It also has a full lossless mode that gets very good compression ratios, and unlike lossless JPEG, is sane.
Re:Prior Art For What? (Score:4, Informative)
Well that may be true, however having had experience of this type of blood sucking weasel facts of that sort do not necessarily do you any good.
Entrust spent $2 million defeating an absolutely crap patent claim by surety. It was so bogus that the prior art for the claim existed in a 1978 MIT Masters Thesis that is extensively referenced (the thesis is credited with inventing the term digital certificate). However it cost Entrust something like $2 million to defend the claim (and Surety paid a similar amount).
The underlying problem here is that not only does the US have a corrupt patent system, but the legal system allows spurious claims to be made that cost imense amounts to defend without risk to the party making the claim.
Nodoby would litigate this type of claim in Europe because the most likely outcome would be that the plaintif would end up paying the costs of the case.
Parent
Re:Prior Art For What? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Two decades!? (Score:3, Redundant)
Re:Two decades!? (Score:4, Informative)
That's correct for newer patents--utility patents expire 20 years from the date of the patent application.
Under the older system, however, patents expired 17 years from the date the patent was granted. ISTR that expiry of the JPEG "patent" is covered under that system, rather than the newer one.
Parent
like it or not, JPG support is important (Score:5, Insightful)
Patent Priveleges (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, this is like someone patenting a water powered car, then letting everyone build there own because they don't have the money to have a manufacturing facility, and then 5 years later when everyone and their brother is driving a water powered car, you come out and say "ok, now you all owe me 10%". It's ridiculous, and criminal.
Re:Patent Priveleges (Score:3, Interesting)
If what you are saying is true then there could be no such thing as "submarine" or "submerged" patents, which is what is going on here. The patent is 17 years old and just now Forgent (new owners of said patent) are wanting royalties from everyone using it. This tactic is being used more frequently by businesses (see any article on the RAMBUS debacle).
Patents do not become invalid due to lack of enforcement. Patent holders don't have to do anything to protect their patents. By law it is 100% the responsibility of inventors to make sure their inventions are not infringing on other's patents. All the patent holder has to do is look for infringements and either work out a licensing agreement with the offender or sue them.
I'm not advocating the system, as I personally feel the trademark law of owner-enforcement requirements to be much better. I'm just pointing out that your statement isn't correct.
My new patent (Abstract) (Score:3, Funny)
Abstract
The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for processing patents to remove redundant information thereby making the patents more suitable for transfer and storage through a limited-bandwidth medium. The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in intellectual property systems. Typically, the system determines differences between the current input patents and the previous input patents using mean-square difference of the patents. These mean-square of the patents are processed and compared with one or more thresholds of redundency for determining one of several modes of operation. After processing in some mode, the sucessfully processed patents are in the form of digital numbers and these digital numbers are coded, using ordered redundancy coding, and stored in the database.
SD
Forgent runs a potential antitrust risk (Score:4, Informative)
They run the risk of running afoul of US antitrust laws. In the famous US v. United Shoe Manufacturing Company case (1941), the courts ruled that patents cannot be used to stifle competition--of which the Forgent patent may just do. This is the same issue that resulted in Rambus running afoul of the law because Rambus was using its patents on DDR-SDRAM to stifle DDR-SDRAM in favor of RDRAM technology.
This will be settled in the courts ;) (Score:5, Funny)
While that is going on. Forgent will sue Unisys for not paying any royalties on the
When the lawyers have taken all of their money, both of them will declare bankruptcy and go out of business.
The wrong way of doing business. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes I don't get our economy. Although I understand that companies want to make money and profit from their products or services, I don't get why some companies are at the public's throat most of the time. Don't the executives get that by making the public angry they're not doing any good to the company's reputation? Do they really expect me to buy anything that involves a JPEG algorithm after a scandal that they put on? If everybody starts pushing for patents and enourmous fees nobody will be willing to do any business, because nobody wants to be sued. I have nothing against patens, they're cool, they can profit an inventor to a reasonable degree and benefit the public at the same time. The companies that hold patents, should be proud of them and open them up to the public, after all that everybody will benefit from whatever they invent and chances are that they're going to make more money than buy suing each other.
Timeline, information, conclusions (Score:5, Informative)
TIMELINE
1986 - Patent filed, Oct 27, Compression Labs, Inc., San Jose, CA
1987 - Patent granted, Oct 6
1992 - JPEG standardized ITU-T Rec. T.81 (1992)
1994 - JPEG standardized ISO/IEC 10918-1:1994
1994 - GATT ammended ("Ururguay Round"), Dec 9
1995 - GATT changes to U.S. patent law go into effect, Jun 7
1997 - Patent acquired by Forgent Networks
2002 - Patent enforced by Forgent Networks
INFORMATION
People have criticised Forgent Networks for not speaking up about the patent during participation in ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Sub Committee 29, Working Group 1. In fact, Forgent did not have the patent at the time.
The patent was granted prior to the GATT-mandated U.S. patent law changes to eliminate submerged patents. Thus the term of the patent is 17 years; therefore the patent expires on Oct 6, 2004, not "in 2006, 20 years from the filing date", as people have been claiming.
It is not the proper role of the ISO to take up a legal battle against patents.
CONCLUSIONS
Forgent was probably unaware of the patent at the time of its participation in the JPEG working group.
Prosecuting the patent after allowing the continued existance for 5 years of an international standard based on the patent is likely a violation of the RICO statutes.
Specifically, USC Title 18, Part I, Chapter 96, Section 1961(1)(A) and 1961(1)(B), "Extortion".
The definition of "Extortion in this case is from USC Title 18, Part I, Chapter 95, Section 1951(b)(2); specifically: (emphasis mine).
It seems pretty clear to me that this falls into the same category as the civil application of RICO to the RAMBUS patents, and to similar recent cases.
So, IMO, rather than expecting the ISO to get into the act, it's more likely time to involve your local Federal prosecutor, instead.
-- Terry
The scary thing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Grrr. (Score:2, Insightful)
Since this is the Register, after all..... (Score:3, Funny)
They're kinda like the Weekly World News [weeklyworldnews.com] of technology. You know, the people who brought us BatBoy?
Re:Since this is the Register, after all..... (Score:5, Informative)
They do not, however, fabricate news. When they report on rumors and venture forth theories and conjecture, they phrase it clearly as such. That places them quite a bit ahead of other tech news sources such as CNet and ZD. They also have the very good online journalistic habit of quoting or linking to the entire original source without editing it down. While editing down the original makes sense for a print publication, online publications have no real reason to.
--
Evan
Parent
Re:PNG (Score:2, Redundant)
JPEG is a lossy algorithm, which gets rid of "unnoticeable" parts of the image, in order to lower the file size.
PNG, on the other hand, is a lossless algorithm, which, when decompressed, gives you byte-for-byte the original image.
If we lose PNG, we can come up with something else. Good lossless algorithms abound. But, AFAIK, there aren't that many GOOD replacements for JPEG.
Re:PNG (Score:3, Interesting)
What if PNG is challenged - will your viewpoint stand?
Over the last few years thousands of patents have been granted, the bulk of which probably shouldn't have - especially in software that has such a massive worldwide explosion in new "inventions" which the orignal authors have not patented - then 10 or 20 years later someone patents it.
The patent office (who make their money from granting patents) don't have the time or the inclination to do a full search - especially when most of the source is hidden from view - it's not just book publishing or visible inventions that need to be searched. But of course, that is an impossible task (and probably breaking a few license agreements plus the DCMA to boot).
So what will this do? Well, the file formats will be published by big corporations who have a large portfolio to challenge other companies. Other people will not be able to risk publishing their formats or their source code. So the world loses - and that includes corporations who are just too blind to see it yet.
Is this really the intention of IP laws? I don't think so.
Regards
Rob Probin
There's nothing to adequately replace JPEG (Score:3, Informative)
OK, I'll take the bait, since I'm qualified to respond. I'm credited on the PNG specification as a contributor, and I wrote one of the first (if not the first) commercial implementations of PNG, for a little company called Mastersoft that eventually got acquired by Adobe (via Frame Technologies). Your facts are half-right -- PNG does give better image quality by virtue of supporting up to 16 bits per channel (16 bits each of R, G, B, and optionally A), and by virtue of using lossless compression, but it does not give better compression in the general case.
JPEG is designed to use lossy compression, and as such, it can attain much tighter compression ratios than PNG can. In some cases, PNG can generate a smaller file than JPEG, but this is a corner case where the original image has a limited color space (e.g., uses indexed color with very few unique colors), and where the original image has abrupt transitions (e.g., line art, or art where regions are solidly colored). JPEG is designed to work well on photographic images, where continuous tones are the norm.
If we lose JPEG as an open standard, there isn't anything left to adequately replace it. PNG was supposed to replace GIF to get around the Unisys patent (GIF tax). JPEG2000 is too new, and there are too few software packages supporting it. JPEG2000 also requires the use of wavelets, and a lot of legacy hardware might be severely taxed processing these new images.
Re:US only? (Score:3, Interesting)
What is MS's stance on this for IE? Did they pay for a license?
What about Mozilla? Are they going to pay for a license?
DjVu (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Does it matter much anyways?? (Score:3, Insightful)