ISO Could Withdraw JPEG Standard

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.

Re:Oh, please...

[Tayto]

Fight what good fight? Forgent broke no laws. Ethically they may be far from clean, but there is no case to be fought here in the courts. Perhaps it can be used to highlight the futility of patents in the public mind, and to other governments around the world - but as it stands, patents are too entrenched in the US for anything to remove them.

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 ;-)

premature?

[minus_273]

does any one else think that this may be a bit premature? after all, they have merely said that they may have patants on parts of the algorithm. As far as we know -- an obviously we dont know everything -- they have not proved it yet.
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?

[shoppa]

How does this affect libjpeg, which comes as part of nearly (OK, not in my favorite, Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]) every Linux distribution?

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!

Too late.

[www.sorehands.com]

Even if the ISO turns JPG into a non-standard, it is in too much use to make a difference. The idea of a standard is to establish the common use and give people safety in having a known way to implement/work with this "standard." This is already done. Forgent has already stole this benefit!

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?

[dpbsmith]

I own a cute little Canon Digital Elph that happens to save images in the formerly-standard JPEG format.

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.

Prior Art For What?

[StevenMaurer]

Again, speaking as an expert, Forgent Networks patent has NOTHING to do with JPEG [slashdot.org]. It is quite hard to find prior art for a patent claim that doesn't apply.

One would hope they'd just fight this nusance lawsuit in court.

Re:PNG

[RobLS]

Are you sure about that?

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

ISO irrelevant?

[larry bagina]

what if ISO threw a party and nobody came?

For line-art, vectors, and indexed-color graphics, png, gif [bleh], or svg should already be used, but JPEG is in wide use, and there isn't a replacement for lossy compression.

Slashdot poll time: Will people(companies) 1) pay attention to ISO 2) develop a new format 3) be a conscientous objector 4) move with CowbowNeal to a country without software patents?

Ironically, our saving grace may come from Microsoft, as they have the employees and the browser to implement any standard they want. They could develop a royalty-free lossy compression format, submit it to ISO/ECMA for certification, and put it in the next IE patch/upgrade within half a year.

Patent Priveleges

[Uttles]

I think this is another case that points to the need for (yuck) more legislation. There needs to be a new law, one that takes the concept of public knowledge and applies it to existing patents. IE, this case, where JPEG has become public knowledge, to the extent it has an ISO standard, yet just now someone comes up saying they have the rights to it because of patent X. As I understand it, you can't gain a patent on something if it's already public knowledge. They need to extend that to say if you have a patent and you make it public knowledge, you can't then claim the rights to the resulting use.

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:Oh, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

"but there is no case to be fought here in the courts".

no patent infringement issue is clear cut. Any patent case can turn on any of multitudes of determinations.

So, what happens is that a poker game ensues during the pre-trial discovery process and as cards are turned over, percentages are predicted for winning/losing the remaining determinations (simple statistics 101). These percentages are weighed against financial gains/losses.

Finally, as probable outcomes become clearer (usually right before trial begins) the sides will settle based upon the knowledge gained during discovery).

No side wants to risk losing all (plaintiff possibly loses patent as invalid), defendant loses big $$$ in adverse ruling.

95% of all patent cases filed settle before the actual trial commences.

Re:Prior Art For What?

[An dochasac]

Didn't the Amiga used Run Length Encoding both for it's IFF/ILBM still images, audio and it's .anim files? Does anyone have Fred Fish disks 0-100? I have a copy of Amiga Dos 1.1

Re:PNG

[martyn s]

Thousands? Over the last few *years*? You've got to be kidding me. Thousands of patents have been issued in the past few *weeks*. The trademark and patent office puts out a book every single week which lists all the patents and trademarks issued since the last book. The book is always at least 1000 pages long.

Re:META Question

[ptomblin]

My point is that if the only stories on Slashdot are going to be ones taken from The Reg, there isn't any point reading Slashdot. The whole point of "open source news" is to collect news from multiple sources that the readership might not encounter otherwise, not just rip off the entire contents of another news site.

As for it being off-topic, what the hell do you think "META" means, anyway?

Re:Patent Priveleges

[Quarters]

That's already there. The law on patents is that if you don't act to enforce the patent for a sufficient period of time, the patent becomes unenforceable.

No, that's trademark law. Patents are viable until the prescribed date they become invalid. The lifespan of a patent differes depending on the type of patent it is.

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.

This is a GOOD THING! Seriously!

[Anonymous Coward]

This jpeg patent deal is like a storm. Sure it makes a hell of a mess but, when it's over, the world is fresh and new.

All you open-source types should realize the value of Forgent doing this!

This will pave the way for more mainstream people saying, "Hey! Wait a minute! I'm not going to get caught with my pants down again! You know, 'Fool me once...' So I'M switching to open-source software with appropriate licensing to guarantee that these scoundrels can't screw me again!"

In other words, situations like this and with Microsoft claiming patent rights on OpenGL will only encourage people to stay away from propriety, corporate-sponsored software and move to open, community-sponsored software that much faster!

Hip hip hooray for Forgent! They're scheming slimy dirtballs but sometimes those people, in their greed and lust for power and money, accidentally do something that'll just screw their own kind in the long run.

Re:US only?

[ZaneMcAuley]

What is Adobe's stance on this issue with Photoshop? Did they pay a for a license?

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?

Re:No

[Quarters]

If they had wanted their money so badly, they should have started enforcing it when they first patented it, not almost 2 decades later. What Forgent is pulling here is bullsh**, and even _they_ probably know it. Ignore it, and it will go away.

As I understand it, Forgent was not the original patent holder. They purchased the patent just a few years ago. If that is true then your ire is misplaced. The anger should be directed at the original patent holder who was nice enough to let people use it royalty free but didn't include any "must be used royalty free in perpetuity" clause in the patent-sale documentation.

Re:Prior Art For What?

[Sangui5]

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:Oh, please...

[Zeinfeld]

Fight what good fight? Forgent broke no laws. Ethically they may be far from clean, but there is no case to be fought here in the courts. Ethically they may be far from clean, but there is no case to be fought here in the courts.

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.

Re:This is a Good Thing(tm)

[mosch]

My exact words were that you should attempt to make a switch to PNG. If such a switch is not practical for your content, then clearly this isn't a good option. Nowhere did I suggest that you should induce suffering or death upon yourself over some JPEG-related patents.

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.

Speaking of alternate image formats...

[paul248]

I just took an 80kb PNG image from mandrake.com, converted it to a bitmap, and zipped the bitmap. The resulting zip file was about 50kb. I also tried the same thing with some PNGs that I had created for my website, and a similar thing happened. Conclusion: ZIP compression is better than PNG?

The scary thing...

[plaa]

The patent is 17 years old, and only now is it put in use. Think how many patents are given to software nowadays. According to the article, in Japan there are 4,000 patents on image and wavelet technology alone. Think of what will happen in 15 years, when companies start bringing out all-but-forgotten patents on everyday algorithms from the good ol' dot-com days... The devastation will be much, much larger...