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Apple Patent Blocking PNG Development
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Nov 16, 2001 01:00 AM
from the everybody-needs-a-png-or-two dept.
from the everybody-needs-a-png-or-two dept.
Daniel writes: "Apple has a patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,379,129) on compositing a source and destination image using a mask image. This patent appears to read on alpha channel transparency, which the PNG and MNG file formats use. APPLE has declared in their patent statement to the Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group that their patent is only available for RAND Licensing. Since this patent appears to read on the PNG file format, Apple is hampering work on the PNG and MNG file formats.
Perhaps Apple would like to clarify this situation by explicitly stating that this patent does not cover the PNG and MNG file formats or by RF Licensing their patent to the PNG and MNG development groups.
Alternatively, the PNG and MNG developers are asking people to submit prior art in order to invalidate Apple's patent. SGI in particular appears to have prior art with their 'blendfunction.' Make sure the prior art you submit is older than May 08, 1992, the filing date of Apple's patent."
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Apple Patent Blocking PNG Development
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Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
- They are a company; their business is making money, not being cool (except to the extend that being cool helps business).
- They are publicly traded, so they have a legal obligation to their stockholders to do their best to make money, even at the expense of being cool.
- Making money means pursuing every strategy available to them to its fullest extent, and taking advantage of whatever the law, the world, and circumstance gives them.
- Sometimes this means doing cool things, like open-sourcing the core of their new OS.
- Sometimes the means doing crappy things, like abusing an overinflated body of intellectual property law.
Of course, if they really do put the brakes on PNG (and let's wait to hear all sides of the story), and if that hurts their business (e.g. it hurts their good standing with their customers and developers), they won't do it. So maybe sending them a polite but firm e-mail asking for an explanation isn't a bad idea.1992? (Score:3, Interesting)
For some non-Apple prior art, when was the first version of Photoshop released? Alpha compositing is its bread and butter, and I'm pretty sure even the earliest versions let you turn an image into a selection.
Re:1992? (Score:4, Interesting)
1992 is the filing date.
It no longer matters under U.S. law when they claim invention, under the new patent regime, which is since 1987 IIRC. (The U.S. in the eighties amended its patent and copyright laws to make them conformant to international standards.)
As another poster pointed out, they're allowed public disclosure of the content of the patent for a year before their filing date. Any earlier disclosure and they themselves are prior art.
However, for prior art from other companies or from private individuals, the day before the patent is filed is early enough to qualify as valid prior art. There was an interesting case with the patent on the Magic: the Gathering collectible card game, as TSR released a competitor to Magic about four days before the patent was filed. Hasbro now owns both companies, but I believe Steve Jackson Games was still able to use the TSR game as prior art to knock down the collectible card game patent.
Yes, the U.S. Patent Office lets you patent the rules to games. No other patent office in the world does. There are worse things than software patents out there.
What a pain in the ass... (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I understand, this patent tries to over-broadly apply to all in-file 'Alpha-channel' blending techniques.
My suggestion is to create an open-patent free protocol that replaces one file transparency with two-file transparency. IE, one file is the base image, and the second file acts as a transparency mask. Since it uses two files, this technique should be free and clear of the Apple patent, right?
An HTML tage for something like this would read something like
< img src="file.jpg" mask="mask.jpg" >
You think THAT's bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM has a patent on that.
Re:You think THAT's bad... (Score:4, Offtopic)
No, but they've definitely used it to their advantage. I came across this information around a decade ago, so forgive me if I'm overly broad or forgotten some of the details, but this is how I understand IBM operated during the original Attack Of The Clones.
Let's say you and I decided back in 1986 to start building IBM compatible PC's. Hey, everyone's doing it, we'll sell 'em cheaper than IBM and make a fortune. So we get the board and case suppliers online, license our own version of the Phoenix BIOS and negotiate bundling licenses for MS-DOS, and we're underway.
Pretty soon after getting started, we get a nice little packet from IBM's legal department which contains photocopies of a few PC-technology-related patents held by IBM, and a polite letter wishing us success in our venture and inviting us to come on in to negotiate a patent-licensing agreement. You and I, being young turks who've never dealt with Big Blue, decide that IBM isn't going to bother with us over a few patents, and blithely continue our little operation.
Some time later (reports vary), there's a knock on our door. Several suits enter, one of them carrying a largish briefcase. They introduce themselves as legal representatives of the IBM Corporation, and in the course of time reveal the contents of the case. In it are complete copies of over four hundred patents with direct application in the construction of a fully IBM-compatible PC, covering everything from the ISA bus to the way the cursor moves when you hit the Enter key. They explain the situation to us, and finally dawn breaks upon our fevered brows.
We sign an agreement granting us permission to use any and all patents involved in PC construction, in return for a nice healthy royalty to IBM for every PC we make. We also sign a non-disclosure agreement which states that we will not only keep the agreement confidential, we will keep the existence of the agreement confidential.
Thus, for several years, IBM made money from every PC ever made, whether it had IBM on the label or not. I assume the patents in question have expired by now, but IBM is a technology-creating machine even now, and a large chunk of their revenue still comes from royalties.
Side note: I fully support this kind of use of intellectual property. If I create something and someone else is making money directly from my creation, I should profit as well. If someone is using my creation for free, however, that's another kettle of fish, and I lack room in these margins to deal with that issue fully.
Re:what if (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you read this [w3.org] linked page? Have you read any statements made by Apple that they are using this patent to prevent you from using the PNG format?
If you look at that page, you will see that Apple does offer a license for the patent as part of the SVG 1.0 patent which is being put together. It looks like they are just being cautious in order to keep their rights to the patent intact, but still allow it to be used for PNG and SVG.There are plenty of greedy corporations out there and Apple may in fact be one, but don't assume they are without looking at all the facts. Take a look at the sites listed in this article, write to Apple and ask questions, express your thoughts to Apple. If you are not then satisfied with what you see then you can make as much noise about it as you want. Making a big deal about this just because someone has implied wrongdoing on Apple's part is just being a follower.
FUD? (Score:5, Insightful)
PNG has been around for a while now, and Apple has never(AFAIK) said anything about it in the past. I really don't see how this changes anything.
Now we're gonna get all these slashbots telling us how Apple is evil and everyone should boycott OS X/Darwin because of this, when they really haven't done anything. Chicken Little ought not be the standard tone of every Slashdot story.
Re:FUD? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a huge difference between software innovation and hardware innovation. Software innovation is sequential and complementary [researchoninnovation.org]. Software development is not a zero sum game. Developers have always used the work of others to build, improve and enhance functionality. In the open source and Free Software worlds, this works through availability of source and the distribution licenses. In the commercial worlds, it works through user groups, conferences and special interest Web sites (like this one [gamasutra.com]) where people can share ideas and code.
If I make a living by it why should I spend time developing software if I can not protect my self from people ripping me off???
Be my guest. Discover a new algorithm without any access to the work of others (I'd be impressed with that straight away) and then patent it. Oops. Is it too expensive? Darn. It seems only the big companies can afford to patent XORing a bitmap with the background to achieve transparency, something I thought up independently when I was 12. And are they protecting themselves from others ripping off this "innovation". Nope - they use patents for attack, not defence. So smaller developers can't write software even when protected by the patent system.
If a commercial software developer comes up with a clever way of coding something he has a right to patent it like any other inventor.
This is a great idea - in theory. The problem is that there are no "clever ways of coding something" which don't boil down to techniques which have been used for years: linked lists, hash tables, look up tables, mathematical operations, bitwise operations and basic algorithms used on basic data structures. It's easy to check this too - pick any software patent held by say IBM, get it translated into English or pseudocode and it will be a trivial operation. Guaranteed.
Open source organizations will have to live with the fact that if some technology is patented by a commercial organization they can not use it free of charge and without permission.
Do you mean technology or software specifically? If software, then commercial organisations should not be using free or open source software at all. Come to think of it, they shouldn't be using the Internet either.
Pay up or bugger off that is the rule of the game. What Open source organizations can do is either come up with alternatives and/or they can stop whining about patents and try to beat Commercial organizations at their own game by patenting software them selves.
Software innovation doesn't happen when development is hampered by a mass of patents. In the non-software worlds, the inventor needs to recoup his costs and thus I can see the need for a limited time of protection. But in software, all that happens is those that can afford to hold patents use them as a weapon against those that can't. And very few true innovations happen in large patent-holding companies. It's the garage operations, the one or two guys in their back rooms who come up with new stuff all the time.
And why should non-US programmers pay license fees to someone like IBM in the US? What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?
How soon we forget our history. (Score:5, Insightful)
It was well known that de-facto standard for file compression in the net, "compress", was covered by the Unisys compression patent. However, showed no interest in enforcing the patent outside hardware (modems and the like), and would informally tell people who asked that.
Nonetheless the FSF insisted on having a patent free compression format for use by GNU, and eventually settled on gzip. This made some people angry, it was annoying to have to deal with a new compression format, and they claimed the FSF was seeing ghosts and that Unisys would never change their policy.
However, as we all know, Unisys *did* change their policy, allthough the target wasn't compress (which meanwhile had lost most of its markedshare to gzip), but GIF which used the same algorithm internally, and had become a big thing thanks to the WWW. Thankfully, at that time we had gzip, and could create PNG fast using the same code.
The morale "they haven't enforced the patent yet" provide false security. Companies don't enforce software patents until it become economically profitable to do so, typically when the algorithm is in so common use that it will be expensive to switch to an alternative. What we need is a legally binding promise not to enforce the patent.
Prior art? Yeah, here's some prior art. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Prior art? Yeah, here's some prior art. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Alvy Ray Smith with Ed Catmull created an alpha compositing system in 1978 while Ed Catmull was doing a paper for SIGGRAPH '78.
He states this in his paper "Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing" in August 1995.
He says that his earliest dated documentation he has for that code is dated January 13, 1978. He specifically showed compositing an alpha image on a background which should just be like another image. I hope this helps
Obvious and WAY older than 1992 (Score:5, Informative)
Every program that combines images and works with true color uses this. It is impossible not to, the algorithim is totally obvious. True color images (ie where the numbers represent levels of red, green, blue, rather than be indexes into a color pallette) were in common use in advanced visualization and simulations in 1980, such as Evans & Sutherland flight simulators. I also saw photo touch-up software that could duplicate a portion of the image and put it somewhere else in 1979, and I believe it must have used this, as otherwise the edges of the cut piece would be visible.
PORT84, Porter, T., and T.Duff, "Compositing Digital Images," SIGGRAPH 84, 253-259.
This is the paper most-often cited, however I think it's main addition is the enumeration of compositing operators and the introduction of "premultiplied" images. Before that I believe non-premultiplied was used as that was the more obvious solution. Also PNG does not use premulitplication.
Even if Apple is going to be a pita about this, it does not affect PNG, as the file format itself does not do any compositing, it just stores a 4th "color" called the alpha. So I would not worry about it there. However Photoshop and Gimp and the in-house program I write for Digital Domain uses this, and about six thousand other pieces of commercial and free software.
Re:Obvious and WAY older than 1992 (Score:4, Informative)
PNG isn't just a file format. It's an encoding and decoding mechanism. The encoding and decoding treat the alpha channel as an alpha channel, not a 'fourth color'.
Re:Time for an Apple boycot!? (Score:5, Informative)
Also think of the confussion it causes when two products look identical. It should let the opensource community do this and not allow companies to do it? What's the insentive?
As for the one-click thing, please. They debuted one-click, so what. They are using, or at least were, using a technology. Don't pick on their website just 'cause they licensed a technology from another company that has a patent on it. What's cheaper, lisencing or going to court? Pick on Amazon for creating such a stupid patent.
And as for the cube-NDA contract issue, please. Gimme a friggin' break. So what if Apple likes to hide their new products until they are ready to do it the way they want. The employee signed a contract that he won't leak information from Apple. What if a competitor such as Dell caught wind and released something just as cool, but earlier. Great, Apple would get shafted 'cause of some ass employee who can't play nice.
As for the BSD crack you made, they are using opensource software and giving back the modified version, Darwin for free. Don't be an ingrate and say "Well, a patent (mind you invalid) exists, they get people to stop mimicing their interface verbatim, use OSS and recontribute while making their OS even more stable than before, so apple reeks." statement. Maybe we should step all over Apple and hack QuickTime, which uses a kick ass codec and try our best to drive the company into the ground.
You've just spread extreemist FUD about a company protecting its rights. piss me off...
Outdated, irrelevant facts w/o more info (Score:5, Interesting)
Who honestly believes Apple would try to milk this almost certainly invalid patent? What do they gain by going after PNG? I think everyone will agree that web standards help Apple, and they are not going to do something against their best interest.
And what is up with /. posting stories about months-old facts with no new developments anyways? I think it is good for /. to bring this issue up and get Apple to clarify their position, but listen to the report: "APPLE has declared in their patent statement to the Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group that their patent is only available for RAND Licensing." They make it sound like it just happened! And while I'm complaining, why is "Apple" in all caps ;)
Re:Outdated, irrelevant facts w/o more info (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing missing is the Linux reference.
standard textbook technique (Score:3, Informative)
I think this leaves only two possible conclusions: either Apple's legal staff and the inventors, Konstantin Othmer and Bruce Leak, are completely incompetent, or the inventors deliberately tried to patent a technique they knew to be in wide use and Apple's legal staff is deliberately trying to enforce an invalid patent. Apple didn't even have the smarts to offer this patent for "royalty free" licensing to SVG.
Forget about any of Apple's claims of openness: this is such a clear case of patent abuse that it can't be an accident or mistake. The open source community would do well to stonewall Apple: don't incorporate OSX-related patches into open source projects, don't port to their hardware, and don't buy their products.
Obligatory link to the patent in question (Score:5, Informative)
CLick the "Image" button to see the lovely diagrams. There are a few items this patent does NOT cover, as explicitely mentioned in the text. This patent does not cover additional channel information, like alpha channels. It only covers a seperate, full color, mask image that is used to mask off the source image.
I have a few questions:
If the patent does not cover greyscale images, then not all sanity is lost!
-B
Prior Art (Score:5, Informative)
We find on page 222 the pseudocode for the WriteColor procedure:
procedure WriteColor(var ColorRaster: raster; x, y: integer);
var i, j: integer;
begin
for j
for i
if GetPixel(ColorRaster, i, j) <> transparent then
SetPixel(FrameBuffer, x+i, y+j, GetPixel(ColorRaster, i, j))
end;
And there was a First Edition published in 1973, for all I know it's in there too.
BTW, there isn't anything Bill Atkinson did for Apple in QuickDraw that isn't spelled out in this book.
Alvy Ray Smith (Score:3, Informative)
The definitive reference on the history of alpha is Alvy Ray Smith's technical memo [alvyray.com] from 1995. It seems pretty clear that he co-invented the technique with Ed Catmull as a solution to a problem that Catmull was having with his sub-pixel hidden surface algorithm.
The earliest dated documentation on his alpha channel code is January 13, 1978, although it was probably written the previous December. See footnote 4, page 6 of the memo for details.
Apple's 10-K (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm an Apple shareholder, and one fine day on the shitter I was reading their 10-K (annual SEC filing), and noticed this interesting quote on page 6 [ccbn.com], under "PATENTS, TRADEMARKS, COPYRIGHTS AND LICENSES":
I thought that was an interesting thing to write, I wonder what, say, Amazon or Microsoft say in their filings about patents?
If anything comes of this patent (I doubt anything will, despite the sensationalist /. headline), you can use that in your letters to Apple or something.
Now this is just silly (Score:5, Informative)
1) This is obvious.
2) There is prior art.
So even if Apple decided to try and enforce it, it'd get shot down however:
3) Apple has already allowed royalty free use of this patent.
Seriously folks, this story is just silly. Think for a moment how many things out there use multi level alpha transparency. All 3d cards from the Voodoo on do, Windows does in movie file formats and in the UI in XP, a bunch of X WMs do. If Apple tried to enforce this they'd have legal teams from all over after them, fact aside that they've already said they won't.
Just because a company has a stupid patent doesn't mean they will try and enforce it.
Requirements of prior art (Score:3, Insightful)
7. A method as in claim 1 wherein said method produces anti-aliased text in said destination image by performing the method with the
source image being a pattern and the mask image being anti-aliased text.
(Claim 1 is the basic alpha-transparency concept).
Suppose that someone comes up with prior art that invalidates claim 1. Apple can still claim rights over the use of this technique for anti-aliased text unless someone can show prior art which covers that specific application. So don't just look for prior descriptions of alpha-transparency: look for prior use of alpha transparency for text, and anything else in the claims.
Paul.
Only applies to triple alpha channels (Score:4, Informative)
It seems like an obvious extension of alpha blending (which was around for a while and is referenced in the patent) but that didn't stop Apple. HURR! WE R SMRT!
It is specifically not alpha blending. (Score:4, Informative)
Alpha blending is directly contrasted to their method in the patent itself. This is no threat to the patent-free status of PNG or MNG.
Re:Isn't the whole point of patents to make money (Score:3, Insightful)
Ignoring the whole "give away" and "intellectual property" parts of it, I'll point out that they aren't being asked to give away anything. They're being asked to stop trying to take something that doesn't belong to them. The idea was not their's, nor was it or its use exclusive to them. The purpose of patents was to encourage ideas, not direct money to big buisness who can afford to file dozens of supirious patents.