Suddenly a JPEG Patent and Licensing Fee 1223
Michael Long writes "Forgent Networks (www.forgentnetworks.com) has announced that it owns the software patent on JPEG compression technology, and has stated that it is "in contact" with computer, software, camera, and other digital imaging product manufacturers regarding licensing terms. This ambush of the digitial imaging industry will probably stand as the worst public relations nightmare a company can inflict upon itself."
I'm outraged! (Score:0, Interesting)
Pantent? (Score:1, Interesting)
JPEG 2000? (Score:3, Interesting)
But this doesn't surprise me. After MS claimed ownership of parts of OpenGL, that sorta opened the floodgates for really sad attempts to bilk more money out of an already financialy strapped populace/industry.
Best of luck to them... (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's face it: it was tough to change people's minds to use PNG instead of GIF. Do they really think they're going to make headway suing people for using JPG images? From the article:
"We wanted to ensure the investment community and the general public are clear about the terms of our valuable JPEG data compression technology, one of the many technologies we have in our patent portfolio," stated Richard Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer at Forgent. "We are in ongoing discussions with other manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners and other products that use JPEG technology for licensing opportunities."
Like I said, best of luck. I'd love to see this guy get his ass handed to him by the very large companies who use JPG compression.
JPEG format released into public domain (Score:2, Interesting)
For everything else, there's Folgers Crystal Meth
Will this push JPEG 2000? (Score:3, Interesting)
to adopt it as a better JPEG both for compression and image quality;
can't the industry just tell Forgent to stick their patent where the
pixels don't shine?
Yes, I know there would still be a transition period to convert all that Pr0n over.
Re:Pantent? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maeryk
Wha? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shouldn't your patent expire if you don't do anything to collect on it?
My new investment strategy is going to be patents. It certainly seems to be the only thing worth any money besides real estate. Surely there are patents sitting around that you can invest by buying them...
Re:I'm outraged! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep - I am starting to feel that there needs to be some sort of regulation that if a patent has been in *widespread* public use after two years and the patent owner has not announced publically that they own a patent covering such technology, then they should be probhibted from suing implementers of the patent. 'Widespread' is is emphasized as the company or individuals should be able to protect their patent if it can be argued that there was a possibility that they didn't realise that anyone was infringing until date x.
Re:Would that force the switch to wavelet (JPEG200 (Score:1, Interesting)
I say it again (Score:5, Interesting)
I say, if you have a patent on something, you have a limited amount of time to claim infringement after the infringement is discovered. This way, the overall damage is minimized and other formats can be adoped or created if necessary. If this company honestly didn't know it had a patent on JPEG, it probably was a waste of money to begin with.
Its one thing to allow the most obvious ideas to be patented, but its quite another to allow someone to take advantage of a patent to fleece entire industries. That's borderline fraud.
-Restil
What have they actually patented? (Score:2, Interesting)
MPEG covered too (Score:1, Interesting)
A quick read suggests that this might also cover aspects of MPEG encoding. Now maybe they have assessed that those rights have been given away - but this might only be the first shot in an ongoing battle for them; trying to get some money to offset their financial position.
Far be it from me to suggest that people take advantage of the supplied email address to make their feelings known to this company of chancers.
Re:stupid question, hoping for smart answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Would make great business sense.. after all.. the razor blades are the expensive part, the handle is free. The algo was free, enough that people started building all manner of devices (blades) around it, and now they want a piece of that pie.
It *is* a lucrative market, too. As long as it was just people creating on PC's jpgs and sending them to other people, there was really no point to licensing it, but once you think about digital imaging as a business, thats quite a cash cow, IF the judge doesnt smack you down.
Maeryk
They did not enforce the patent..... (Score:2, Interesting)
My understanding is that a patent that is not actively defended could be lost (similar in some ways to a copyright) -- the company, at a minimum, should have been offering licenses deals almost 15 years ago already.
This forces companies to be active in defending their rights -- rather than allowing others (competitors) to unknowingly infringe for years and then get ambushed years later with a "convenient and fair license deal".
It is not considered good faith to let a patent lapse and attempt to enforce it years later (consider BT recent attempt at licensing hyperlinks) -- this usually angers the judges and the "infringement" cases are thrown out or "settled" quietly out of the public eye.
Re:They should do well with this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or will someone pop up and try to screw us all with that format too?
Re:They should do well with this... (Score:5, Interesting)
The standard is from 1994 (Score:3, Interesting)
That, unfortunately, puts this patent way before the JPEG standard. I hope there's prior art. .
Investor relations (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Forgot" Networks (Score:3, Interesting)
Not applicable to JPEGs (Score:5, Interesting)
- The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in video compression systems. It focuses on intra-frame compression technologies, incl motion detection and compensation, etc.
- This patent seems to only cover lossless transmission. (Removing redundant data, not removing information.)
- It uses Huffman-coding after performing statistical analysis, run-length encoding, etc, but not details on cosine transforms, which JPEG uses.
It appears that other patents they reference describe existing systems which use cosine transforms with lossy compression...MJPEG Only? (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyone else for storming the USPTO, I think with a few thousand angry tech ppl at their door they might change their stupid policies, or at the least we can disrupt them enuff to delay other more recent and stupid patents...
Why they do this (Score:3, Interesting)
- Lawyer's call it "The Last Sport of Kings". Why? Because it takes from between 2 to 4 million dollars, US, to effectively defend or litigate a patent infringement suit.
- Because of the high cost of defense or litigation, patent holders use this cost as a weapon to force capitulation by firms that don't want the costs of defending themselves, regardless of merit.
- Because of the above, patent holders will typically target small companies first, extort licensing fees, and then use those fees to progressively fund attacks against other potential violators.
- Once a patent is out, it is presumed that everyone knows about it. That means if you infringe the patent, you are open to damages for the time that you infringed the patent. The exception is that if the litigator bought the patent, they only get to sue from the time that they owned it.
So, what does that mean? You can bet that if they owned the patent the entire time, they very deliberately let widespread adoption of Jpeg's go forward, knowing that they could afterwards sue and probably settle with a number of graphics products producers, since even if the producers stop using their patented products, they were in violation of the patent for a long period of time.Oh, and yes, IANAL.
It's not the patent, it's the licensing (Score:3, Interesting)
IANAL but I know that in order to be able to license copyrights and trademarks for a fee, owners are required to pursue infringement when it happens, otherwise they basically lose the right to the trademark/copyright. Is there a similar provision for patents? It's not like some bizarre little no-name company is the only one to have been using JPEG compression for the last 16 years...it's been all over the place. Shouldn't they have had to enforce this patent sooner in order to be able to license it now?
That said, this company (Forgent? Who the fuck are they?) is basically going up against Sony, Kodak, Adobe, Microsoft, etc. Are they really so stupid to think that these guys are going to just spread their cheeks for them without a fight? I don't think so.
E
ps...I just noticed this [theregister.co.uk] link over at El Reg that mentions that Sony already ponied up. Wussies.
Re:I'm outraged! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention, a lot of corporations dont want their employees to do patent research (unless they're filing patents themselves); willful infringment (ie: saw that patent, didnt think it applied) puts you in a much worse position in court than infringing without knowing a patent existed at all.
Re:I'm outraged! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They should do well with this... (Score:3, Interesting)
only 500 images? (Score:1, Interesting)
cd ~/documents/work/boringstuff/.porn/
wget -nc -r -l 5 www.autopr0n.com
rm `find -type f -not -name "*.jpg" -not -name "*.JPG"`
Re:They should do well with this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm outraged! (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought MPEG was a series of JPEGs.
explain?
Re:This is so broad......... (Score:2, Interesting)
I used to work there (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately as the generic PC became faster and better at handling video, there became less and less of a need for dedicated video compression hardware. The company started losing sales and going downhill. Compression Labs did have an industry niche, a very easy to use system that was completely turnkey, but as with so many things, low cost won out in the end.
VTEL, a competitor, bought Compression Labs. VTEL made similar videoconferencing machines, but they were integrated with a PC. They were harder to use, but had PC niceties such as the ability to share PC files and access over the videoconference. Unfortunately they weren't selling very well either.
I left the company around the time CLI was bought out by VTEL. It seems they've renamed themselves to Forgent, and set up a business model of providing services instead of selling boxes. Probably a smart move. It is a dumb move to enforce this patent, though!
While CLI had a lot of good patents, they applied mostly to video and the way it was compressed before transmission and restored after reception. They used the H.* standards for digital video transmission, but there is a lot of leeway in how you process the video signal at both ends to make the most use of the bandwidth, and this is where CLI's patents came in.
I don't believe this patent could apply to still images such as JPEG. Reading the patent, I see it mentions successive video frames quite often. Maybe there are some parts that deal with JPEG-like encoding methods, but IANAL. Honestly, I don't believe this patent can be valid, especially after the company submarined for so long and is only now claiming enforcement. They were a company I was once proud to be a part of, and it makes me sad to see them stooping to this level.
An open letter to Forgent (Score:2, Interesting)
If your firm pursues the threatened licensing on JPEG at this late date, I'll be forced to regard your firm as another of the those of lax ethicial standards uncovered in recent months. If you had intended to charge for JPEG usage you should have made that clear from the first; to pursue this approach very much appears to be a "bait and switch" tactic unworthy of an honest firm.
As such, pusuit of JPEG licensing at this point will result in efforts on my part to ensure that no Forgent Networks products are used in any system or business unit I have influence with. I can not in good faith expose my firm to to the risks policies like yours bring to the table.
Once upon a time (circa 1986) a firm known as SEA had a patent on a software compression technology that dominated the market. Businesses paid large amounts of money to use SEA's ARC, and private individuals used a freeware package known as pkarc to read and create their own archives. SEA decided that the "free" usage was costing them money and started threatening to sue people using the free product for non-commerical use. I was a BBS operator in that era.. within a month the now famous "zip" compression format was created and released. Within 6 months ARC compression was virtually extinct in commerce and popular use; today only us oldtimers know that it even existed.
Those who do not know history are doomed to recreate it. You are now warned... there is always another company and product that can take your place. All your firm can gain from this unethical bait and switch is bad publicity and the loss of value.
Re:IANAL... is there anyone around who is? (Score:4, Interesting)
The U.S. Supreme Court has long held the laches defense applicable to patent infringement cases. The defense contains two elements:
# The patent holder delayed bringing suit and that delay was unreasonable and inexcusable; and
# The alleged infringer suffered materially prejudicial harm from the delay.
A.C. Auckerman Company v. R.L. Chaides Construction Co., 960 F.2d 1020 (Fed. Cir. 1992), citing Lane & Bodley Co. v. Locke, 150 U.S. 193 (1893).
However: Patentees against whom the laches defense has been successfully invoked are barred from collecting only those damages that accrued prior to filing suit. (same citation)
Thus these guys can file suit, and if successful force royalties until their patent expires in a couple of years.
Fourier transforms? (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't the JPG compression routine use Fourier transforms? If it does, then this patent doesn't seem to cover it, since I certainly can't find a reference to Fourier in their filing.
Just a question...
Re:Would that force the switch to wavelet (JPEG200 (Score:3, Interesting)
So, yeah, you can patent math, just like you can now patent genes that occur naturally. It's a wacky world we live in.
-jon
Re:History repeats itself (Score:3, Interesting)
As did Geoworks with WAP [thestandard.com]. In the graph of GWRX's stock performance [yahoo.com], can you find the point at which the suit was filed?
hint: It's right before the stock skyrocketed from the teens to its all-time high north of $50.
BBSing! (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, Im sure I can dig up a backup of those GIF2JPG.EXE utils which would probably have a date they were made in them too.
jpeg patent (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:This is so broad......... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Pantent? (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the IRS thousands of blacks put a "slavery reparations" deduction on their income taxes every year, and every year some slip through. So yes, they are getting reparations -- illegally, with my tax dollars.
Re:Wha? (Score:1, Interesting)
That's why you see all those signs and fences around undeveloped plots of land near lakes and beaches. The owners don't usually give a crap if people cut through and go swimming. But they have to be able to point at efforts to mark the territory private, otherwise land owners can be forced to maintain paths and public access once they try and develop.
This is why if you go to the UK there are public walking paths cutting through private golf courses and estates. People used the land for a long time before the development and gained a right to it.
There is a big old public path through JPEG if you ask me.
Henry Ford and the Selden Patent (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fields of use / patent ownership vs creation? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I think the clause about satelite broadcast means:
1. The Satelite Broadcast industry (ie DirectTV) is MPEG based.
2. MPEG makes use of JPEG like techniques.
3. The Satelite Broadcast industry has obtained licensing for the relevant JPEG patents for use in MPEG compress video streams for satelite delivery.
Therefore, that licensing has already been negotiated. This would help explain why they didn't try to press this patent on JPEG until now. They had money coming in and were complacent.
Why it took them so damn long to wake up to the fact that there was money in JPEG is still a mystery. The Web went commercial more than 5 years ago. Consumer grade digital cameras, which make entensive use of JPEG compression, have been around for about as long.
Re:I'm outraged! (Score:3, Interesting)
Interestingly enough there is a format called MJPEG which, in fact, IS a series of JPEGs. I have a Miro DC30 capture card that uses MJPEG compression. Since all the frames are easily seperable (unlike MPEG) this format is good for video editing.
Justin
Re:IANAL... is there anyone around who is? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you wait for someone to build a factory before you bring out your patent, you are certainly prejudicing the case, since the existance of such an investment makes it much harder for them to avoid infringing upon your patent in the future.
The patent doesn't cover JPEG (Score:5, Interesting)
The claims in this patent cover digital streams which tend to come in tuples, possibly with appended data. Something like this:
(1,4) (1,3), (1,6), (4,6), (3,6), (9,6)
It specifically claims the separation of these tuples into separate run-length encoded streams.
In my example above, it might be:
(3x1, 4, 3, 9)
(4, 3, 4x6)
There are some further claims about coding signs and amplitude, and some table lookup mechanism to support the above.
The trouble is (for the patent holders), this is in NO WAY how JPEG works.
JPEG divides a video stream into blocks (8x8 and 16x16) of pixels, and runs them through a descrete cosine transform. Basically, this turns the representation of the picture into level and percentages of vertical and horizontal waveforms of various frequencies. It then quantizes these values (reducing their size and precision), and orders them from low frequency to high frequency. Then it subjects the whole thing to a run-length algorithm optimized to eliminate zeros (which high quant values tend to do). JPEG is a lossy algorithm that takes advantage of the fact that our eyes don't pick out errors in high frequency components as well as we do low frequency.
About the only claim this patent that's similar to JPEG is the Run Length Encoding. But that is covered by prior art that goes back forever.
Cyber Squatting? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone else see this as a general tech form of the illegal Cyber Squatting procedures? Someone buys a domain, possibly with the knowledge that the domain will soon be wanted by someone with deep pockets, holds out until the deep pockets offer to cough up enough cash, and then sells. Here we have a company that claims to have rights to a technology, attempts to spread the technology as a standard so deep pockets begin using the technology (deep pockets = the public and companies developing products for the public), holds out until enough pockets are using the technology, and then claims rights to the technology and asks everyone to cough up. The only problem they have is getting at the individual user, so they attack the companies that service the individual user... but then what happens? The companies just soak up the loss, right? No we soak up the loss in the form of higher prices. This patent claim is complete bull terds, and I hope that someone (some company) will be able to prove so, as I would rather soak up 5 million or so in attorney fees than 15 million or so for every major company that produces jpeg creation and manipulation software or components.
Strong evidence for "Obviousness" (Score:2, Interesting)
The JPEG standard is the result of a cooperative project by people in the digital imaging field. Isn't that a strong argument against this patent?
As Jeffrey D. Ullman said in his 2000 Knuth-Prize Lecture: "An idea is nonobvious if it would not be discovered by one of 'ordinary skill in the art' when the idea was needed."
Re:Ticker symbol: FORG (Score:2, Interesting)
microsoft gets the patent, then charges a penny per JPG viewed in Mozilla. IE remains free.
Re:They should do well with this... (Score:5, Interesting)
PNG is a royalty free community owned format, similar to Ogg Vorbis...
There is a lot of misunderstanding in the open source community as to how patents work. The claims made by Ogg Vorbis (i.e. it is patent free) are extremely unlikely to be true. Similarly, it is unlikely that the PNG format is not patented by someone.
The problem is that people tend to think of patents in much the same way that they think of copyrights. With copyrights, if a developer creates something without reference to the work of others, that developer is free and clear of other's copyrights, and can make it freely available. Not so with patents. A developer may create a new technology (PNG, Ogg Vorbis, etc), and that developer may choose to not patent it, but that technology is not free and clear of patents unless nobody has patented anything that is used in any part of the technology. If any part of your "new" idea has been thought of before, you're not clear of patent issues. Given the sheer number of software patents being filed and issued, given the incredibly broad claims that are being allowed, and given the fact that you don't have access to what patents are pending in the patent office (generally for a few years) just waiting to pop up, nobody can back up a statement such as, "I developed this, and it is patent-free."
I truly wish it were otherwise. As a former patent attorney, I have been watching the coming train wreck for a while now. It is only a matter of time before major chunks of what the open source community relies on turns out to be patented and owned by non-too-friendly people.
-Steve
History repeating (Score:2, Interesting)
Reminds me of the compression war of '88.
"Back then people compressed the files with a program called ARC by Systems Enhancements Associates (SEA).
ARC would take the original files and compress them into one file with the extension of ARC. When you downloaded this file from the BBS you unarced it by using ARC.EXE. This was great until a gentleman named Phil Katz came up with the idea of improving ARC.
See, Phil found out you could speed the compression process and even make the files more compressed. Instead of one file for compression and decompression, Phil made two. The result was PKARC for compression and PKXARC for decompression. This is where the fun began.
SEA got really ticked that Phil had done a better job of compression and decompression while maintaining compatibility. In the great American way, instead of competing and making ARC better, they sued.
A few months later, PKZIP was released and that was it. I can't find a Systems Enhancement Associates website, but PKWare is still in business. Sysops dropped almost every other compression type and went with ZIP and as they say, that is history."
So go ahead "Forgent Networks". We'll find a better format.
We miss ya Phil.
http://www.compunotes.com/OpinionSection/philkatz
PROTEST OF NEW COMPUSERVE-UNISYS GIF USAGE TAX (Score:2, Interesting)
Among the first reactions, some bulletin board systems had all GIF files deleted from their hard disks (or converted into JPEG format). Common remarks included:
"PROTEST OF NEW COMPUSERVE-UNISYS GIF USAGE TAX !!"
"They [CompuServe] seem to think that GIF is the greatest thing since free online magazines."
"The announcement by CompuServe and Unisys that users of the GIF image format must register by January 10 and pay a royalty or face lawsuits for their past usage, is the online communications community's equivalent of the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor."
http://www.cloanto.com/users/mcb/19950127giflzw.h
Alternative to JPEG (Score:4, Interesting)
But, guess what? The most basic and fundamental of concepts in this field was covered by patents. This drove all companies and researchers away from the field. Today, I hardly hear about it.
The whole concept of patenting an algorithm is stupid. I am sure there are thousands of other promising areas where further research could have greatly enhance our lives - except that greedy patents make it impossible to pursue research in that area.
People who argue that patents give incentives to innovators fail to realize that an idea is only a spark. It can realize its full potential only if a lot of further research and development is done on it. However, the very same patents serve as deterrants for people who want to do further research.
Patents halt innovation, not the other way around!
Re:Didn't apple try this? (Score:2, Interesting)
If they're so interested in providing free web standards, why haven't they released Quicktime for Unix yet?
For some reason I feel that Apple is not porting Quicktime to Unix for the same reason Microsoft didn't port Internet Explorer to Linux - to prevent unnecessary encouragment of an alternate platform. If you doubt that big compaines do such things, consider why Microsoft ported IE to Solaris and HP/UX [microsoft.com] , but not to Linux. I can assure it it wasn't the $50 it would have cost them to recompile on their test Linux box. The reason is that Sun and HP aren't marketing Solaris and HP/UX as replacements for Windows and therefore not a potential threat. Proof that Microsoft is more interested in money than improving the world's overall computing experience.
Am I surprised? Not really. I'm also not surprised that I still can't download Quicktime for Linux. If Real was selling an OS, they'd fail to produce a Linux port of RealOne [freshmeat.net] , just as Apple has failed to produce a Linux port of Quicktime.
Ahh.. but you see. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The standard is from 1994 (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember ARC vs. PKZIP (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They should do well with this... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Now PNG (Score:2, Interesting)
as well. Here are the specs of their "lossy" format -
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/jng.html
Looks heavily based on JPEG to me. I wonder how this
will affect the MNG image format (of which JNG is
a part)?
Cheers,
Si