JPEG Committee On The Ball, Seeks Prior Art

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."

Good!

The idea is just silly. Makes me want to go patent the Redbook standard and sue the RIAA.

Re:Good!

The idea is just silly. Makes me want to go patent the Redbook standard and sue the RIAA.

Funny you should mention that ... the CD Specification [bizland.com] is stuffed full of patents (mainly from Philips & Sony) which are due to expire in a year or so. I doubt you'll notice the couple of cent drop in price of a CD due to not having to pay the patent holders when they do expire though :-)

The only recent time Philips has got upset with the RIAA was when they weren't sticking to the Redbook standard [slashdot.org]!

Jpeg

So how will this impact the whole GIF vs. PNG thing?

PrOn to the rescue

Ahh, time to bust out with my prOn collection. As every /. reader knows the prOn industry has been at the bleeding edge of technology. :)
Im sure some one has an image that can show prior art.

Re:PrOn to the rescue

Um, shouldn't that be "at the breeding edge of technology"?

...

Thank you, thank you, I'll take those groans as my applause :)

<tool>This is necessary</tool>

From the original "Forgent" Press Release:

"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.

Nope

Although it does smell a bit like Rambus, the situations aren't really similar at all.

The big difference here is that Rambus was a member of the standards body in question (JEDEC). The agreement they signed to become a member of this standards body obligated them to disclose patents. They didn't and thus violated a contract.

As far as I can tell, Forgent is not a member of the JPEG organization, nor did they ever propose to the JPEG body that they adopt their IP as a standard.

The two situations may look similar on the surface, but that is where the similarities end.

Re:Nope

As far as I can tell, Forgent is not a member of the JPEG organization

The last time Forgent's patent (actually Concurrent Labs) was discussed, one poster said that he had been involved with JPEG, and Concurrent Labs was a member in 1992-95 (IIRC). This patent was granted several years before CL joined JPEG. All the members, including CL, signed agreements to reveal all patents and applications related to the standards under discussion. CL never brought up this patent. This means one of three things:

1) CL was in breach of their contract with the JPEG organization.

2) CL reviewed this patent vs. JPEG's compression methods and decided it did not cover JPEG, so it didn't have to be brought up.

3) The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing - that is, their still-picture people on the JPEG project didn't even know about the video compression patent.

When Forgent bought CL, they bought up their liabilities along with their assets. So they had better be arguing #3, because #2 is an admission that their suit is groundless as far as anything in the JPEG standard before 1995 goes, while with #1 JPEG can sue to be "made whole" by requiring Forgent to license it's patent(s) for free for JPEG applications. And I doubt that CL was ever big enough to make #3 very believable...

In other news...

... the Porn Industry is expected to hit a recession... heh :)

They had no choice but to do this...

The JPEG Committee had to do this. So what if there is a new standard? Without securing the old one, who would adopt the new one.

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.

Re:The role of standards bodies

At least the first group Forget (intentionally misspelled) contacted wasn't the developers of The Gimp or something.

Why would they? When you're doing something like this, open source people don't have cash to pony up, and help keep people dependent on the technology in question.

Besides the obligitory "Forgent-ery" joke...

Their patent describes a technique for digital video compression that uses some of the same mathematical techniques as JPEG, only their method requires more than one frame to be present to offer any significant compression (so I have been told).

If that is true, that alone should be enough to tell Forgent to piss off.
IANAL

Something I don't get.

I know that in trademark law, if a company fails to vigorously enforce a trademark they lose claim to it. The effect of this is McDonald's sometimes sues a little family restarant called McDonald's and other strange insane lawsuits.

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.

Yes, they really *are* different. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they *are*.

Be glad the IP laws are different - otherwise, the owners of books and movies *WOULD* be legally obliged to sue fanfic writers.

Re:Something I don't get.

Be glad the IP laws are different - otherwise, the owners of books and movies *WOULD* be legally obliged to sue fanfic writers.

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.

So let me see if I got this straight?

They're calling apon all the old skool pr0n collectors?

Prior Art?

So.. If they want prior art that pre-dates the patent in question, all we need to do is find, lurking in some deep and dark corner of the internet, some REALLY old JPEG compressed image, most likely pornography.

Course, to prove that this file really was old, we'd have to find the subject and maybe pose them the same way to show it's the same person, and then.. uhh.. no, wait.. old person porn.. Eww!

Please disregard!
*opens wallet, prepares to just pay the stupid royalties*

-Matt

Isn't JPEG just a FFT?

I thought that JPEG was just a Fast Fourier Transform of the encoded data. How can patent this with so much history in the Mathematics literature?

Crazy

Some thoughts and questions

1) Patent 4,698,672 can be searched for at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm. The URL is too long to paste here.

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:Some thoughts and questions

Can someone decrypt this? Babelfish doesn't have a mode for legalese yet ;)

It'll Expire Next Year

If the patent was filed in 1986, then it will expire in 2003, 17 years later. Please remember that the underlying problem with patents is bad legislation.

Re:It'll Expire Next Year

Actually, it'll expire 17 years from date of issue, since it is grandfathered as a submerged patent filing. In other words, it's governed by the old rules because it was filed under the old rules.

Patents files on or after June 8 1995 are 20 years from date of filing; before that, patents were from date of issue, not of filing, and their term was 7 or 14 years, and grew to 17. One of the reasons for the change to a 20 year term was the move to date of filing as the baseline date.

Either way, it's too damn long a period for this industry.

-- Terry

Prior art?

I'm sure there's some on my page... Just try, Forge-it, just try.

after looking at their site...

... at least we know that bevels are safe.
Drop shadows too!

OpenGL/Microsloth patent dispute is the same deal

This is the second major IP bombshell to hit the computing community in the last few weeks. First, the implied threat of M$ playing the patent card with their acquisition of an openGL patent, and now this. This seems to be new tactic among greedy corporations which involves seeking out widely used patents whose owners have allowed free use by non-commercial entities, purchasing the patent, and then announcing new restrictions in a effort to cash in on it's popularity.

It seems to me that a patent that has been released into the public domain (at least for non-commercial use) should remain so if and when the patent is sold. I don't believe that there is any law requiring this, but anyone selling an 'open patent' should include a requirement that it remain open as terms of the sale to avoid this very situation.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone should decide to challenge a patent that was open only to be closed at a later date. Think about the series of events: Group A invents an image compression algorithm and grants me license to use the patent free of charge. I develop a group of products based on this agreement. Everything is cool until Group B buys the patent and says I can't use the patent anymore (or worse, demands back royalties). But wait, my products were based on a agreement I had with Group A, not Group B. Group B came in after the original agreement and is trying to change the terms of my agreement with Group A after I've executed the agreement. I would argue that Group B would be compelled to honor any agreements that Group A had in force at the time of the purchase as part of the package of buying the patent.

===
All your patents are belong to us.

The patent process needs good prior art databases

What the JPEG Committee is proposing is a general 'prior art database' which should be generally useful for any image related dispute. This is a 'good thing'(tm) whether anyone is currently trying to claim JPEG prior-art or not. The current patent process desperately needs quick and easy ways to search for prior art.

To see why, consider the standard process for creating a patent in a large company:

1. You write up an overview of the patent, and submit it. Presumably you know your field, so the first 'prior art filter' is you - have you heard of anything similar?
2. You hand it over to your companies patent agent. (S)he will probably be assigned to a particular field (e.g. 'audio/video/image processing'), so understands the area, but is not going to be an expert.
3. The patent agent reads through your explanation and does a prior art search - and returns to you a selection of things that may be relevant.
4. You explain how your invention is novel compared to these. If you convince him, then the wheels are set in motion, and your company (eventually) submits a patent application.
5. The Patent Office reads it and searches for prior art. If they find none, your patent is granted, while if they find something, then it is up to you/your company to dispute their findings.

So, in steps 3 & 5 you have legal experts who understand the area, but are probably not technically expert in the exact field of the patent who have a responsibility to search for prior art. They are also under time pressure, as they have loads of proposals to deal with. So what they do is pull out a few relevant keywords from the proposal and search on them in some prior-art database.

The most obvious (and easy) database is the existing patents DB. Now, I'm sure they have other databases they use, but whenever I've been through the process, nearly all the potential prior art which has been returned to me via the patent agent has been previously published patents. So if an idea hasn't been patented before, then it's got a good chance of getting accepted as a new patent.

So if the JPEG group build an extensive, easily searchable catalogue of prior art (with times, keywords, etc.), then it will make the patent agents life a lot easier, thus increasing the quality of patents.

What about AOL/Quantum Computer Services?

Been around since 1985. Hopefully they would still have something lying around...

about jpeg web site

So I visited www.jpeg.org
As an official site of one of very popular graphic format, I found it's very crappy looking
Well, I shouldn't judge the web site by its look, but someone has to clean up that cheesy look.

I work for JPEG2K, posted this story Friday..

.. And was rejected. The exact story, and I posted it because we were in committee discussing it. Someone else posts it, and it's news? I really thought that whomever arbitrates this, was interested in content, not in particular authors. changes my idea of how this forum works. Bit more elitist than I thought.

Does JPEG 2000 have an open license?

I tried a few searches, "jpeg 2000 (license/patent/open source)", but
I didn't find anything. Any tips?

Software patents should be abolished

If software patents become widespread, I can easily imagine a situation where one violates 100 patents just to write an extremely trivial program. Computer software is a very evolutionary art form. Every program written owes a large debt to previous developments. We are fortunate that up until recently, almost all software innovation was done in a climate largely free of patents. I sometimes wonder what things would be like if Apple had won its patent fight with Microsoft over Windows.

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 doubt that Forgent have read through the patent

If you read through the patent claim forgent has you can see it is RLE encoding based on LZW and not approximation like JPEG has. Forgents patent is non lossy where JPEG is, actually it has more claim to PNG than JPEG in that case. Which is not very good either if you ask me. I also had a look through the database at the patent office and there are hundreds of similar claims to all kinds of compression algorithms. Some are so fuzzy you could applicate them to anything. Somehow I feel this is only the beginning. The patents really needs a change in the laws in order to clarify the patents and get rid of these ambushes. Fortunately in EU you don't have to care about patents as long as it is for free use.

Simple solution

Hire Google to overhaul the USPTO prior art database.

I wonder

Would a "Prior Art" angle work for OpenGL? As most of you probably know Microsoft is claiming IP rights over parts of OpenGL. You just know that when the time is right they'll try to use any rights that they have to hurt Linux. The time will probably come when the gaming industries decides that Linux is a viable market.

Then I'd sue the Patent Office for infringement.

I'd scorch the heiney of the moron who allowed this drivel so totally that the closest he'd get to papents again is shining shoes.

I think that the patent office should go back to being a not-for-profit organization or government departement, ASAP.

This was a STUPID idea from the get go.

Yet another reason for no patents on software

Patents on method in software is just plain stupid.
Often it is just a matter of putting stuff together.
All combinations do not have prior art. But there is often nothing special with it.

Blatant attempt to get a "Funny" tag

...the JPEG committee hope to have it in place prior to their next meeting in Shanghai...

Oh no! They've been shanghai'd!

(incoming rotten tomatoes in 3... 2... 1...)

I Detect Favoritism.

.. Because I submitted this story way earlier and this one gets accepted?

Assclowns.

* 2002-07-19 13:19:40 Video Conferencing Company to Persue Royalties on (articles,money) (rejected)

Oh wait, actually I see why now! It cut off my subject at "Royaltes on..." where I had JPEG. It showed up in the damn subject text box!

Assclowns! HEH.

Perhaps I should patent the "off by one" error...

Or buffer overflows... or the easter egg [in software]...

Nothing like being able to sue a company for the bugs they include in their programs (and there are always some!). And I doubt anyone's thought to patent bugs just yet. "It's a whole new paradigm!"

On second thought, the really scary bit is that someone probably *has* thought of it.

gezzz

What they mean by prire art is a older paten that may cover the same thing or is/can be applyed to jpeg, Not your dirty old p0rn

Public right of way

Well, when land ownership changes, and there is a public right of way (which is loosely what the standard brings to the party), the new owner cannot revoke the public right of way. Now, personally, I feel that information etc should not be treated the same way as physical property, but, if companies want to do that, then they should live by the existing rules.

Not reading the article, eh?

According to the article, JPEG 2000 has had extensive work done to obtain royalty-free licensing. In general, it is thus implied that the JPEG committee believes JPEG 2000 to be unaffected by the patent claims which allegedly restrict the existing JPEG standard.

Re:waste of hardrive space and bandwidth

Back in the day porn used to be a whopping 16 colours! We don't need 256 colours, 16.7 million is just overkill.

JPEG2000 not a replacement for DCT JPEG

JPEG2000 will not succeed as a direct replacement for JPEG. It is a much more complicated standard that has significantly larger performance costs. JPEG2000 will find big wins where it has big benefits, namely in networked progressive rendering that scales by resolution/quality/spatial-location. As a "stand-alone finished file format" it does not provide enough benefits to replace JPEG. The biggest advantages of traditional JPEG is its relative simplicity and it ubiquity. Time and again the world relearns that the world will not beat a path to your door for a better mousetrap, it takes huge benefits to overcome Metcalf's Law (paraphrased as: the value of something scales geometrically with its ubiquity)