JPEG Committee On The Ball, Seeks Prior Art 219
Sangui5 writes: "It seems as if the JPEG Committee has noticed the recent patent fuss, and is working on the prior art angle. Good to know that even though there's a new standard, the committee is standing by their previous work."
<tool>This is necessary</tool> (Score:5, Insightful)
"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."
I'm not sure I'd even praise the JPEG group for taking swift action - I'd say they're doing what's necessary to combat Forgent's crime. Doing their job as a standards body like an officer does his job as a member of the police. Read that press release again, and try not to grit your teeth.
If you want my opinion (and I'm sure you don't), a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted - for a calculated conspiracy to defraud the general public and standards bodies.
They had no choice but to do this... (Score:5, Insightful)
They could say two things:
1) We've got a new standard. Just move every image on the web to it.
2) This is absurd. We're going to fight this, but if all else fails, slowly adapt the new standard.
At least now, with option number two, they maintain credibility, as they don't have unreasonable expectations.
Also, a bit off-topic, but is there any real competition for a web photo-quality image format? PNG is an obvious GIF killer and is slightly entrenched (IE, has browser support), but JPEG2000 isn't as far as I know.
Besides the obligitory "Forgent-ery" joke... (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is true, that alone should be enough to tell Forgent to piss off.
IANAL
Something I don't get. (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this same thing not apply to patent law at all? A company has a patent, allows it to be deluted, and then goes after everybody. In trademark law, this would be thrown out of court.
Now you could say "Trademarks and Patents are two different things" but they are really aren't. And so I'd like a laywer to explain to me WTF gives companies the right to broadside tech firms every few months with bullshit patent claims.
Re:Something I don't get. (Score:4, Insightful)
Be glad the IP laws are different - otherwise, the owners of books and movies *WOULD* be legally obliged to sue fanfic writers.
Some thoughts and questions (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The jpeg.org page seems to indicate that the patent only affects the baseline implementation of JPEG. If this is true, then it should be possible to write a new baseline implementation that doesn't infringe on the patent.
3) I'm curious what prior art will show up. In 1986, many people were still using BSAVE/BLOAD to store images.
Re:Something I don't get. (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, many claims against fan fiction are based on trademarks. However, if the trademarks are used in a non-commercial way, things get murky with regard to having to enforce the trademark.
Second, I think it would be good if companies were required to enforce all of their IP claims quickly and fully. Then, writers of fan fiction would have clarity, and companies would be force to make a choice. Does company X want a thriving communities of fans, or do they want tight control of their "property"? Right now, they have people enhance the value of their property, but then they go after them when a buck is to be made.
Strict enforcement of laws is good even if you disagree with the laws: it is only through strict enforcement that the general public sees why some laws don't make sense.
Re:Prior Art? (Score:2, Insightful)
Google has usenet posts from wayback when-the-fsck. There may be prior art there even though any binary encodes will probably be blown out.
Software patents should be abolished (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to write software for a very large corporation. We were frequently encouraged to file patents for anything that we invented. We were rewarded even if our patent application was rejected. A successful patent application was a big deal. The corporation was quite sensibly trying to build up its portfolio of patents.
Eventually, you may have to work for some big corporation to write software. Only someone with a big software patent portfolio will be in a position to cross license with the other big players and thereby receive legal permission to use a basic set of key patents. I expressed this concern to a lawyer at Unisys, and his response was basically 'So what?'. He said that he thought that this had already happened in the chemical industry.
I guess that I was something of a crackpot to voice these views inside the big corporation where I worked. It was very encouraging to find out that the folks at the League for Programming Freedom(http://lpf.ai.mit.edu) share my reservations about software patents.
I wonder (Score:1, Insightful)