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USPTO Rules Fogent JPEG Patent Invalid
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 26, 2006 11:49 AM
from the burn dept.
from the burn dept.
fistfullast33l writes "Groklaw has reported that the USPTO has ruled the broadest claims of the JPEG Patent held by Fogent to be invalid. PUBPAT, the organization that requested the review, released the news earlier today. According to PJ, the ruling will be hard to overturn as the 'submitters knew about the prior art but failed to tell the USPTO about it.'"
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Forgent Patent Troll Loses Again 95 comments
anagama writes "Forgent Networks, a patent troll, got the slap down by a TX jury in May when it invalidated a patent Forgent held regarding video teleconferencing over telephone lines, and today, its motion for a new trial against EchoStar was denied. In fact, the court awarded EchoStar $90k in costs. Forgent probably isn't crying that much though, it already extorted $28m from other defendants. Some of you may recall that Forgent made a business out of cheating companies for jpeg use — till their patent was largely invalidated on that front as well."
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Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks folks. I'm here all week. Try the veal.
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Hard to overturn but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if they didn't know about the prior art, why should it affect the ruling if prior art was involved? Since they knew about prior art but didn't report it, they should be fined.
Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
I vote for jailed. Fines are just a part of doing business, and do not appear to be much of a deterrent these days.
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:4, Insightful)
The original concept idea was to encourage people to put money into business, because if it failed the owners would not be liable for any debts it left. Your liability was limited to however much you had put in.
Individuals working for a corporation are still responsible for any criminal offenses they commit or conspire to commit.
Even if the people involved are the owners their limited liability for debts was never intended as a shield for criminal behaviour.
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:5, Informative)
What Dan Ravicher was referring to is the duty to disclose any known prior art found prior to, or during patent prosecution. Courts have frequently punished patent holders for knowing failing to disclose prior art by invalidating the entire patent. This usually only happens in court when someone gets sued for patent infringement, or when a party takes the issue to court to get a declaratory judgment finding the patent invalid. Surely no one out there wants to spend the money it'd take to get this invalidated in court.
When the issue gets brought up before the PTO, they generally just invalidate the broadest claims, and narrow the scope of the patent until it's worthless.
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
You stated that this would be unreasonable punishment if they weren't convicted of a crime, that is precisely what you stated. Which is very strange since what was proposed is a punishment that could be levied in just such a case.
Of course it would be wrong to bar people from jobs in certain industries for no reason. But the idea of preventing someone convicted of a crime from doing so again, where's the problem?
Let's put it in some perspective via an example: Should a cop that abuses his power and is convicted of doing so to commit a crime be able to continue being a cop? Why shouldn't an executive convicted of something like fraud on a large scale be barred from continuing to do business in the industry they purported the crime in in the first place? Wow, a punishment that fits the crime, how novel.
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter what you call it -- an "industry", an "estate" of society, an "institution", whatever -- the point is that individuals who have been handed authority must also accept the other side of that coin: responsibility.
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? Medical doctors who compromise their patients' safety for their own gain can lose their license to practice. Lawyers who break the rules of their profession can be disbarred. Stockbrokers who trade illegaly on insider information lose their license and go to jail. Scientists who plagiarize or falsify their results become pariahs in their fields, and although they are not necessarily sanctioned by the law or a licensing body, nevertheless they effectively can no longer practice. Ditto perhaps for artists, musicians, writers, etc. All of these people find some other way to make a living.
The problem, I suppose, is that in the business world, flaunting the rules without getting caught is something that one's peers often admire because it can increase profits. I'm not saying businesspeople gone bad should always be banned for life from their fields, but some kind of progressive punishment that includes a professional sanction is, I think, appropriate.
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Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:2)
All things considered, I'd rather jack them where it hurts a bit more.
Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hard to overturn but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Hard to overturn but... (Score:5, Informative)
Why is it harder to get an invalidation ruling overturned after you failed to mention known prior art? Because every detail of your submission is gone over with a finetoothed comb and you never get the benifit of any doubt.
The rules for prior art are fairly clear, when you file your patent you have to include all of the related prior art you know about and defend why your patent is not covered by the disclosure therein - there are several rules including
- timeframe - a published prior art must be dated 18mths prior to application date
- relatedness - OK it looks similar but it's not really the same thing because....
- progression - Yes A is prior art and B is prior art, but there is no prior art showing A can be linked directly to B. - IE the 'on the internet' loophole.
Groklaw [groklaw.net] has a writeup by an IP lawyer about what is & isn't useful prior art, but I can't find it at the moment.When you get to relatedness and progression, there is a lot of subjectivity - and having knowingly failed to provide information relavent - all of this will be reviewed with some prejudice against you.
If you knew about a prior art, and did not file it with the patent, you have also done a bunch of things:
- you committed purjury because you have to state you know of no additional prior art when you sign the patent application.
- if the prior art would have been enough to invalidate your patent, you have committed fraud - obtaining services/goods under false pretense.
- made more work for the USPTO. If you file prior art & the reason it's not enough to invalidate your patent, the patent office will blow off the first round of protests, using that prior art, as 'reviewed and deamed insufficient' meaning "we looked at it before we gave the patent & think you're grasping at straws". Puting most of the work on the person seeking to invalidate the patent not the USPTO. On the other hand, if you don't present the prior art, they have to completely review the whole patent.
So in a perfect world, if they failed to file known prior art, this would be a 'bad monkey - no patent for you' moment. They didn't play by the rules, therefore the whole patent and all information contained therein is transfered to the public domain. That's how you make a company play by the rules, you set it up so getting caught cheating not only hurts them, but helps their competition. Unfortunately we all know it's only a perfect world if you have the money to buy the legal system.In this situation, where they have already received the patent and forced companies to pay on the patent, I think those companies might have a civil case for fraud based on the fraud perpetrated on the USPTO ($108M + triple damages isn't pocket change to anyone but MS & GM). Note that if it's just a bad patent and you didn't withhold any information, then there's no fraud, just incompetence on the USPTO's part.
IANAL but this is what I have gathered from Groklaw and a few other sources. If someone wants to correct me please feel free.
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USPTO (Score:5, Funny)
Re:USPTO (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:USPTO - Even More (Score:5, Funny)
Especially if you promote it as a new Energy Source.
Heck, you can probably get VC funding for it as well.
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Re:USPTO - Even More (Score:5, Funny)
Having worked with a few, I can understand the confusion.
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Re:USPTO - Even More (Score:3, Funny)
I think that's a completely inappropriate and insensitive comparison. One group acted in a completely vicious and amoral fashion: causing great suffering, imprisoning people for years, and acting with a callous disregard for human life. Whereas the other group was just a bunch of communists rebels.
Re:USPTO (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:USPTO (Score:3, Funny)
Why Oh Why (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does it take them so d@mn long to accomplish this in the first place? Even when a patent is finally ruled invalid -- and should have never been granted in the first place -- it seems it happens only after years of legal damage. No one is served well by this, except the lawyers.
Re:Why Oh Why (Score:5, Insightful)
Question asked, question answered.
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Re:Why Oh Why (Score:4, Insightful)
They're not inherently evil or lazy...they're just in a very bad place.
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Excellent timing (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, but is it enough? (Score:5, Informative)
No, the core problem wasn't with the patents, although those were bad enough. The core problems are ignorance (most people don't know what options exist), inertia (those who do often won't take advantage of them because it requires change) and stagnation (sufficient inertia kills all incentive to further develop alternatives). I would not be against compulsary education on how to be versatile, for this reason.
It is hard to blame Fogent alone, when the entire national attitude is based so firmly on milking every old idea for what it's worth, whilst the populace make no effort to avoid being bilked. As with those in Dilbert who have met the "world's most desperate Venture Capitalist", it becomes hard not to just take the money and run.
This isn't to say such conduct is good or acceptable - it isn't, in my opinion. Rather, it is to say that we should be addressing the whole problem, not merely a selection of the symptoms.
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Re:Yeah, but is it enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
PNG was not made to replace JPG, so I wouldn't call anything moot. PNG is not made for photographs, which make up a decent percentage of pictures out there. I actually don't know of any competing formats to jpeg other than this new microsoft one - how come no one has built an open format like PNG for photos?
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Re:Yeah, but is it enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
However PNG as good as JPEG, are you out of your damn mind? PNGs are MASSIVE, they aren't as big as RAW files, but that's it. They don't even approach JPEG sizes for photos.
For example, I have a photo here of a cute kitten loaded in Photoshop. According to PS, it's about 791k raw inside PS itself. If I tell it to save it as a PNG 24-bit, the sizes goes down to 317k. Good bit of compression, but still large for the web. However if I switch it over to JPEG compression and set it to use the maximum quality profile, it is only 69k and is subjectively the exact same quality on my monitor. Medium is the first level where there's noticable degradation, and it's down to 37k there. Even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant using 8-bit palettized PNG (which is lossy since you lose colours) it's still 172k, over double the largest JPEG.
PNG is great for lots of things, but JPEG it ain't. You don't want to try using PNG for large pictures on the web, it'll screw over anyone on dialup. With sizes as much as 10x a JPEG file, it's just not feasable.
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Re:Yeah, but is it enough? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah, but is it enough? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah, but is it enough? (Score:3, Informative)
PNG rarely ever compresses better than JPEG. In particular for photographs. You're probably thinking about GIF.
If freedom was sufficient, in itself, the format would have been dead and buried within 60 seconds of the patents being filed.
Nonsense. The Forgent patents haven't stopped anyone from using JPEG. The free software libjpeg library from IJG has been out there the whole time, Gimp and similar programs never dropped JPE
Strategic Error (Score:4, Funny)
Do they have to refund (Score:4, Informative)
Well this was a stupid summary (Score:4, Informative)
News headlines! (Score:5, Funny)
Crap... (Score:5, Funny)
Of JPEGs and PICs (Score:2)
Re:Of JPEGs and PICs (Score:4, Insightful)
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Another proof that the system is broken (Score:5, Insightful)
The peer review system that is being discussed sounds like a step in the right direction. There also needs to be some significantly less costly way to deal with claims of infringement and the ndefense than the Courts. Small companies can't afford to defend their patents or to challenge someone with deep pockets trying to enforce a patently bogus patent!
And it will remain broken. (Score:3, Insightful)
We will always have to go through this. As far as business interests are concerned, patents are simply assets, and sometimes extremely valuable ones. I doubt that such interests would risk the loss of such valuable assets.
For
Check out the actual communication from the USPTO (Score:5, Informative)
Three Things To Think About (Score:5, Insightful)
2. We need more public patents - and we need places like universities and colleges and publicly-funded institutions to file them, or at least on renewal reclassify the patent as a public patent but administer it, with a portion of revenues being used to reform the patent system.
3. Software is not, nor should it every be, patentable. Copyright? Sure. I published freeware and shareware at the dawn of public computing (70s/80s). But not patentable, nor should business processes nor conceptual methods be patentable. It is just plain wrong.
I don't expect you to agree with me, but I think this latest USPTO ruling brings up the issue on the public JPEG usage. JPEG is from the publicly-funded Jet Propulsion Laboratories - which we pay for with taxes. Open source depends on public patents, or at worst private patents signed over to OSF and other groups to administer.
Forgent says... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ti cker=forg&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=861407 [corporate-ir.net]
I'm an idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
DAMMIT, EDITORS, DO YOUR JOB (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks, PUBPAT (Score:3, Insightful)
It's since showed itself to be absolutely vital in the midst of this software patent madness. It's good that there's lawyers out there ready to go in to bat for us developers. No matter how smart we think we are, and regardless of how much we'd like the system to just go away and stop bothering us, it isn't going to just yet. So PUBPAT are there for us, fighting a fight that must be fought, even if it is crazy that things have got to this stage in the first place.
Assuming PUBPAT continues its fine work, it will rapidly find itself as a sort of guardian angel of the software developer -- be they OSS, FS, or even commercial writers.
Re:So what's left? (Score:3, Informative)