Forgent Networks Wins $25M from Sony for JPEG Patent 270
SuperBanana writes "A story at the Imaging Resource reports that Forgent Networks just won a $25m lawsuit against Sony, for unpaid royalties on patents Forgent bought back in 1997 for $65,000(there's a nice return); the lawsuit concerns patents on 'JPEG encoding and decoding', which Sony's cameras supposedly infringe upon. Sony is challenging the ruling. Older Slashdot stories covered this back in 2002 when this first popped up on people's radar screens, mainly when the ISO threatened to revoke JPEG's ISO status unless Forgent stopped throwing its weight around. Supposedly Forgent only has until 2004 to get all it can out of the patent."
Re:jpeg alternative? (Score:4, Informative)
We've been using PNG for the past 3 years for our projects without any problems or hitches.
Take a look at the PNG Home Site [libpng.org]
Ummm...Forgent? Read Article... (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong headline: this is not Forgent. (Score:5, Informative)
The headline and the text of the Slashdot submission are wrong. Sony paid $16M to Forgent Network some time ago as part of an out-of-court settlement. But this article is about a different company: St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants Inc. of Grosse Pointe, Mich. That company is the one that has won $25M in court.
Please read the text of the article and the press release appended to it, and you will see a different story than the one given in the Slashdot submission. The press release contains a quote saying: "this lawsuit is similar to out-of-court settlements reached by Forgent Networks and Dallas based law firm [...]" but the two cases are different. They are both bad, but the companies are different.
Re:jpeg alternative? (Score:5, Informative)
They both have their uses. For image storage, PNGs are better as they are lossless, but for transmission over slow links a lossy JPGs is much more effective.
Gifs/pngs are better suited for drawn images with a small variation in detail, where jpeg is better for photographs or other images with high detail.
And PNG support in IE is horrible. In a recent project I worked on recently I had to convert most of the PNGs to GIFs because IE did not support transparency correctly, let alone the alpha channel. Things were wonderful in Mozilla, whereas in IE they were horrible with lots of jagged edges and I did not know why at the time. Then I realised it was the alpha channel that Mozilla blended the image correctly with the background, and in IE it was a mess. I had to make various gifs with different color backgrounds to achieve the same effect in IE.
The project I am talking about is in here [sertorio.ipv.pt]. You can use login test, password test to see what I am talking about, namely the icons on the table after login. It's in portuguese but you shouldn't have many problems with that I hope.
Regards,
pedro
Re:JPEG 2000? (Score:3, Informative)
No, I don't think so. The Forgent patent covered DCT-based image/video compression schemes (cut up your image into small blocks; apply a discrete cosine transform to each block; quantize the DCT coefficients, allocating little precision to high frequencies; do some sort of entropy coding on the quantized coefficients), i.e. JPEG and MPEG video. JPEG 2000 is wavelet-based and not covered by this patent, though I am somewhat worried by their choice of arithmetic coding as their entropy coding. I was under the impression that some aspect of implementing arithmetic coding was a little shady, patent-wise (but I don't have any hard facts on that).
Shows that one should use media that is open and patent free (such as ogg/png/etc) after all...
Shows that there is no such thing as "open and patent free". Remember the "burn all GIFs" days? As PNG support wasn't widespread enough yet, many a GIF was reencoded into JPEG, as that was open and patent free. People thought.
Not exactly JPEG patents (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, if you read the patents linked from the article, they aren't even patents on JPEG. They make claims on the use of compressed storage formats in digital cameras, such as JPEG.
What digial camera doesn't have the capability to store compressed images? Nobody would buy a camera that wasted memory by storing uncompressed images. Therefore, these are essentially patents on digital cameras!
Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)
Suppose that you have 100 individuals. 99 of these people have an income of 100 dollars/day. The other one person makes only 50 dollars/day. Looks like 99% of the people have `above average income'. (In case you were wonderng, average means `mean', not `median' and not `mode'.)
You're assuming a bell curve distribution. While this assumption may be correct much of the time, especially in real life, stop throwing around words like `impossible' when they don't apply.
(Either that, or you think that `average' means `median'. Of coruse, for a bell curve distribution, mean, median and mode are all the same thing.)
Re:Peoples first reaction.. (Score:3, Informative)
Now, St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants Inc. through the law firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi has successfully sued Sony claiming that the company's cameras infringe on four patents dating back to as long ago as 1992, which it purchased in 1995. The judgement was nowhere near the staggering $171.4 million dollars in royalties St. Clair felt it was owed on Sony's $3.01 billion in camera sales since 1998, but at $25 million on patents it obtained for only $65,000, the company is doubtless still laughing all the way to the bank.
Re:Not exactly JPEG patents (Score:2, Informative)
Now that I think about it, the Marineer 4 spacecraft that flew past Mars in 1965 used palette simplification, which can be considered a form of compression. Although the TV image from its cameras produced analog signals, the Marineer images were sent back as digital (binary) data. IIRC, the palette (grey-scale) composed of a smallesh integer range, like say 16 or 32 "steps".
After all, they would probably use real numbers if they had unlimited bandwidth or hardware speed. Using smallesh integers is a form of compression.
Thus, if the patent claim is for *any* compression of digitized camera info, prior art existed in the early 60's when the probe was built.
Gotta love NASA.
Re:jpeg alternative? (Score:3, Informative)
This is ill-informed rubbish and should not have been modded up to its current level of 5. PNG is a replacement for GIF, not a replacement for JPEG. JPEG is a lossy compression scheme intended for photographic images, which can achieve extremely high compression ratios. PNG is a lossless scheme applicable to any kind of image. For photos, you can easily get a factor of 40 compression with JPEG on an image where PNG would give you a factor of only 5. On the other hand, PNG gives excellent compression on line drawings, which JPEG compresses poorly. Apart from the fact that they can both compress images, they have nothing in common and neither is a replacement for the other.