Forgent Networks Wins $25M from Sony for JPEG Patent

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."

JPEG 2000?

[forgoil]

Does this also affect JPEG 2000?

Shows that one should use media that is open and patent free (such as ogg/png/etc) after all...

ridiculous

[mholt108]

This sux. Can I say it loud_enough. These people did not earn this, same as the cretin water rights speculators. How about someone heads over there and throws a few bricks through their stupid selfish window.

The legal system has become the new stock exchange. Bloody Hell. They should all be charged for treason.

matt

I'm confused

[esarjeant]

I thought JPEG was an open standard, why does Forgent stand to profit from this?

Unlike GIF [burnallgifs.org], JPEG was established by a standards body (ISO). Now they want to renege on that.

Register [theregister.co.uk] has more info on this one. Weird.

Re:Enough already

[Animus Howard]

> Isn't a 384.6% return-on-investment enough for
> them to have got out of it already?

It's a return of 384 times their investment (38400%) but even so...

An interviewer once asked multi-billionaire J. Paul Getty "You're a very rich man. How much is enough?"

He smiled and answered quietly, "Just a little bit more."

There is a fine line....

[Voltas]

There is a fine line between Patents protection and prevention of the propagation of technology. How close do you hold your cards to your chest before you release that your product is so proprietary that no one uses it?

Sony was using JPEG in there cameras... that kept the oh so VALUABLE compressed image technology on our systems. If yah sue everyone that uses your tech then your tech will disappear. We have maybe one other image compression tech? oh no wait, we've got a tone.

I'm not an open source junky ... some of us need to get paid, but chasing patients on industry standards just because you gave it away and now EVERYONE uses it is dumb.

Re:jpeg alternative?

[Zog The Undeniable]

I agree, PNG is brilliant, but IE doesn't support it fully, which hinders its use by webmasters a lot (seeing as IE ownz0rs the market, for better or for worse).

Implications for C#

[j3110]

If you can give a product to the ISO body as a standard, then still file patent claims against people, then what does the ISO standard mean???

Does this not pave the way for MS to enforce patents on anyone implementing their .Net functionality?

Also, why is it that people say Java is proprietary, but ISO standards are not? In the JCP, in order to get anything accepted, you must relinquish all patent rights in it. Sounds to me like the JCP is better than ISO of ensuring that a standard is not proprietary.