Apple Patent Blocking PNG Development 357
Daniel writes: "Apple has a patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,379,129) on compositing a source and destination image using a mask image. This patent appears to read on alpha channel transparency, which the PNG and MNG file formats use. APPLE has declared in their patent statement to the Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group that their patent is only available for RAND Licensing. Since this patent appears to read on the PNG file format, Apple is hampering work on the PNG and MNG file formats.
Perhaps Apple would like to clarify this situation by explicitly stating that this patent does not cover the PNG and MNG file formats or by RF Licensing their patent to the PNG and MNG development groups.
Alternatively, the PNG and MNG developers are asking people to submit prior art in order to invalidate Apple's patent. SGI in particular appears to have prior art with their 'blendfunction.' Make sure the prior art you submit is older than May 08, 1992, the filing date of Apple's patent."
1992? (Score:3, Interesting)
For some non-Apple prior art, when was the first version of Photoshop released? Alpha compositing is its bread and butter, and I'm pretty sure even the earliest versions let you turn an image into a selection.
What a pain in the ass... (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I understand, this patent tries to over-broadly apply to all in-file 'Alpha-channel' blending techniques.
My suggestion is to create an open-patent free protocol that replaces one file transparency with two-file transparency. IE, one file is the base image, and the second file acts as a transparency mask. Since it uses two files, this technique should be free and clear of the Apple patent, right?
An HTML tage for something like this would read something like
< img src="file.jpg" mask="mask.jpg" >
You think THAT's bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM has a patent on that.
GIF? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm also pretty sure (but can't find evidence) that SGI's "Haeberli" image format dates back to the late 1980's - that format has a full alpha channel.
I certainly designed hardware that would render textured polygons composited by alpha blends back in the late 1980's. I have screen shots taken from that system. [sjbaker.org]
(Notice the alpha textured trees in the righthand image - those are 'composited via a mask').
Earlier than that, the Quantel Paintbox (used in TV studio's to produce 2D artwork) had some kind of alpha-based compositing feature.
This patent would have had to be filed in about 1978 to have avoided all prior art - and even then, it would have been considered 'trivial' IMHO.
Outdated, irrelevant facts w/o more info (Score:5, Interesting)
Who honestly believes Apple would try to milk this almost certainly invalid patent? What do they gain by going after PNG? I think everyone will agree that web standards help Apple, and they are not going to do something against their best interest.
And what is up with /. posting stories about months-old facts with no new developments anyways? I think it is good for /. to bring this issue up and get Apple to clarify their position, but listen to the report: "APPLE has declared in their patent statement to the Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group that their patent is only available for RAND Licensing." They make it sound like it just happened! And while I'm complaining, why is "Apple" in all caps ;)
Is Apple being unreasonable? (Score:2, Interesting)
Holding a patent is one thing, vigorously going after people who use the patented technology is another. I'm not up on my legalese but I do see that Apple provides a RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory terms) license for the use of the technology. I'm not sure what the implications are, but it does look as if Apple is making an attempt to accommodate the SVG 1.0 patent.
If people think that Apple's terms, or the terms of any of the 11 other patent holders involved, are too strict then I'd say your best bet is to write a nice letter to Apple explaining why you think so. Apple holds a lot of patents and, from what I've seen so far, are fairly reasonable about opening them up. Of course they still want to hold on to their intellectual property, but they have opened up patents in the past for reasonable use.
Re:PNG Open Source Masturbation (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple's 10-K (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm an Apple shareholder, and one fine day on the shitter I was reading their 10-K (annual SEC filing), and noticed this interesting quote on page 6 [ccbn.com], under "PATENTS, TRADEMARKS, COPYRIGHTS AND LICENSES":
I thought that was an interesting thing to write, I wonder what, say, Amazon or Microsoft say in their filings about patents?
If anything comes of this patent (I doubt anything will, despite the sensationalist /. headline), you can use that in your letters to Apple or something.
Re:FUD? (Score:3, Interesting)
discussion about this at the same time the whole W3C RAND licensing issue was a big deal, there has
not been anything since then (unless, of course I was unsubscribed from the PNG lists without my
knowledge, hard to tell when you get a few hundred
linux-kernel emails a day).
In any case, no threats from Apple ever about PNG, just speculation and pre-emptive prior art
gathering on the part of the PNG group.
Re:FUD? (Score:2, Interesting)
You can say whatever you want against patents but they are not the root of all evil. Patents have been an accepted part of doing business on this planet for a very long time. And they are not likely to disappear any time soon because like it or not they are essential to commerce. There is nothing colossally more wrong with being able to patent software than there is with patenting hardware. If I make a living by it why should I spend time developing software if I can not protect my self from people ripping me off??? If a commercial software developer comes up with a clever way of coding something he has a right to patent it like any other inventor. Open source organizations will have to live with the fact that if some technology is patented by a commercial organization they can not use it free of charge and without permission. Pay up or bugger off that is the rule of the game. What Open source organizations can do is either come up with alternatives and/or they can stop whining about patents and try to beat Commercial organizations at their own game by patenting software them selves. Of course there is a thin line between people protecting their patented inventions and a few greedy misguided individuals b*tt f*cking patent-laws and using them in ways these laws were never intended to kill of pesky competitors but that still does not make patents the root of all evil
With regard to Apple: If Apple has a patent then it is Apples right to sue those who violate them. With regard to Apple I admit to being somewhat unfamiliar with its long and distingushed history of using patents to block file formats. Were these suits legitimate attempts at protecting its rights with regard to its patented inventions or were they all purely malicious attemts at killing off competitors??? And besides what do you think Apple has to gain from Killing PNG off?
Re:FUD? (Score:2, Interesting)
The patent has not recovered the outlay in developing the technology
Extension to 17 years (the maximum) would recover the outlay.
Society would benefit form the patent being profitable
Generally, patents are only extended where the government has held up the patent for its own benefit, or, for example, with a drug which took ten years of development/trial before the government granted a licence.
Which means the patent may be valid in the US, but expire in the EC, see my previous comment about patents respecting national boundaries, and the rest of the world not being required to respect US law.
Unless subjected to a rain of cruise missiles.
Re:1992? (Score:4, Interesting)
1992 is the filing date.
It no longer matters under U.S. law when they claim invention, under the new patent regime, which is since 1987 IIRC. (The U.S. in the eighties amended its patent and copyright laws to make them conformant to international standards.)
As another poster pointed out, they're allowed public disclosure of the content of the patent for a year before their filing date. Any earlier disclosure and they themselves are prior art.
However, for prior art from other companies or from private individuals, the day before the patent is filed is early enough to qualify as valid prior art. There was an interesting case with the patent on the Magic: the Gathering collectible card game, as TSR released a competitor to Magic about four days before the patent was filed. Hasbro now owns both companies, but I believe Steve Jackson Games was still able to use the TSR game as prior art to knock down the collectible card game patent.
Yes, the U.S. Patent Office lets you patent the rules to games. No other patent office in the world does. There are worse things than software patents out there.
Re:FUD? (Score:2, Interesting)
But in software, all that happens is those that can afford to hold patents use them as a weapon against those that can't.
Nobody died and made software god. Big evil companies have been using Patents as Weapons for over a hundred years. Sam Colt got a patent for his revolver and used it to kill his competitors for years until the patent expired. This was despite the fact that revovlers were nothing new and what he patented has existed since the 16'th century. I think that is called prior art! There was also the famous case of Ford vs. Selden another example of people generalizing a patent and using it to pulverize the competition. Seldens claim was eventually thrown out of court and the Patent system matured. So welcome to the real world. Software patents will happen because there is a good reason for them and the Software patenting system will eventually stabilize and if it does not there are the courts.
What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?
Because they got to the patent office before you did. The road to faliure is littered with brave souls that thought of it first but got to the patent office second. Big evil corporations or any one else holding a patent can tell you not to write software, say a GIF editing utility because they (In this case Unisys) sunk money into developing GIF, they patented it or key components of it and they have a right to demand license payments of anyone who uses their patented technology. It sucks ass but that is the way the world works, people play hardball, and the real world just arrived in Software-land.
It's right because it's right! (Score:1, Interesting)
Well there's a self referential argument if I ever read one. Instead of arguing his points you take two short sentences out of context and then rail your meaningless (in context) points home. Can you say, "argument lost"?
Re:Prior art? Yeah, here's some prior art. (Score:1, Interesting)
Grab an old anime cel.
These are produced by layering transparencies upon each other. Thus a composite image is generated by applying layers of transparency. This technique made facial animations easier and offered nice effects for "sparkly things" that may be around a character, for example during a dream sequence.
Re:Only applies to triple alpha channels (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, in the shading language, surface shaders set an output color and opacity, both as RGB. To generate the final image, these are then blended the obvious way, from the Porter and Duff paper that other people have referenced. Here is a link to PDF of the spec [pixar.com], and here is a direct link to information about surface shaders [pixar.com].
Now, the amusing thing about all this is that the prior art here is from Pixar, which of course shares the same CEO as Apple...
-matt
Great! So now what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Big corporartions won't challenge a patent in court because there's a huge financial disincentive to do it. They could spend years in court and blow tons of money and still possibly lose. On the other hand, the patent holder will license the patent to them for a less exhorbitant sum. If Adobe had to pay to license PNG from Apple, they'd just pay the fee and pass the extra cost directly to the consumer and not bat an eye.
The people who have the most to gain from challenging patents are small ISV's because they can hardly afford to be dumping limited resources into royalties. That problem is made even more complicated when you are talking about open source development. Of course they can neither afford royalty payments nor the court costs and time necessary to fight the patent. If a patent is going to expire in 4 or 5 years, why bother fighting because by the time you get through the courts it won't matter anymore.
The end result of this is that innovation by small software vendors and open source developers is totally crippled by patents. Whether a patent is for a legitimate innovation or not is irrelevant to these groups because as soon as it gets approved and somebody demonstrates a willingness to enforce it, it becomes off limits to these groups.
Einsteins patents (Score:2, Interesting)
There will of course be many innovations whose creators will not patent because they do not consider the protection worth the trouble usually because the innovation is incidental to their business plan (if they are a businessman) or their livelyhood (as is the case of educators and hobbyists). But if they are inventing something that they intend to sell they either keep their innovations a secret, patent them, or fail.
As a small example, if you work, do you make a living at your job? Have you ever done anything you consider original and not obvious? Did you patent all such things?
Well I am a designer and an illustrator, my living is entirely dependent on intellectual property in the form of copyright laws. If I did not own the rights to my work I would not be able to sell those rights to my clients and I would have no recourse against anyone using my works after their initial publication. - Open source software as we know it would also be killed by the eradication of intellectual property rights since the creator of the software would have no way of putting those open source conditions on the use of their code.
History is very clear on this point - prior to the development and refinement of intellectual property laws many innovators were undercut and made destitute by competitors that freely copied their innovations but were not saddled with the development costs
When did this stop happening?
Um I thought we covered this - when intellectual property laws were developed. When it does happen the inventor now has legal recourse and a right to be compensated by those using his invention.
How big was Einstein's patent portfolio? Are we marginalizing anyone that does not patent what they do?
Perhaps I misspoke - I should have said technilogical progress rather than scientific progress. Einstein was of course not primarly an inventor but a scientist and a researcher (and patent clerk). Scientists discover natural principles about the universe, inventors apply those principles to some practical purpose. E=mc2 is not patentable but the methods and techniques of applying that physical principle to actually create a nuclear bomb or power plant would be.
As for Einsteins patent portfolio I don't know how extensive it was but at a minimum there are the 45 patents he filed jointly with Leo Szilard, interestingly some of which were for a refrigerator without moving parts.