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JPEG Patent Could Impact The Gimp
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Apr 24, 2004 01:03 PM
from the notacon-falls-silent dept.
from the notacon-falls-silent dept.
SeanAhern writes "A number of years ago, Forgent acquired a patent on some of the algorithms required for JPEG compression and decompression, and recently sued 31 big-name IHVs and ISVs. A Newsforge article gets into some of the details and asks whether open source tools like the Gimp could be liable as well. To add fuel to the fire, the Joint Photographic Experts Group's committee thinks that some of the patent may be invalid. The p2pnet.net story mentions that the FTC has some skepticism as well. We originally talked about this on Slashdot back in the summer of 2002."
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JPEG Patent Could Impact The Gimp
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gif all over again (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.quelrod.net/)
Re:gif all over again (Score:5, Informative)
(http://mclarenhome.com/~dougmc/)
And .gif already had a replacement that was superior in most ways -- .png. The only problems with .pngs are 1) not everything supported them at the time (but now most things do) and 2) it didn't support animated pictures like gifs do. (But I think mpng does, but nobody uses it.)
The jpeg patent, from what I can tell, ignores the prior art that was out there when it was filed, and so that makes it invalid (but that needs to be proven in court, of course.) That, and there really isn't anything out there that's really ready to replace jpeg.
Beyond all those import things that are different, sure, it's gif all over again :)
This is a very bad trend (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.metlin.org/ | Last Journal: Friday July 20, @01:58PM)
NF: Would a free software program that stores images in JPG format, like the GIMP, be violating your IP rights by using JPG?
Noonan: That's a difficult question, I don't have the answer to that. I have to defer that to our legal team.
Of course, just to be safe, it might be wise for the GIMP developers (as well as all other open source image processing projects which use JPG) to volunteer to donate a percentage of their revenues to Forgent Networks.
WTF?! What revenues? The developers are getting donations and the like for the contributions they are making by working for free. This is plain ridiculous, people are putting in their free time to help develop software that will benefit everyone, and giving it away for free.
And jackasses like this want a piece of the pie? What about the good old days when knowledge belonged to the world, and people put out their works for everyone else to use?
Yet another reasons how patents are blatantly misused. First of all, its not even sure if they have the rights that they claim to have. At the very least, they could have spared non-commercial entities.
Stuff like this gets me worked up to no end.
The statement notes that at least two other companies (Philips and Lucent) are similarly claiming to have patents that relate to portions of the original JPEG standard, and expresses disappointment that some organisations are trying to cash in on what was developed to be a license and royalty-free standard.
And what has been contributed by the OpenSource community to benefit everyone else, is being made useless by pointless litigations.
Remember kids - We now live in an era where giving away knowledge and helping people is WRONG! You need to be greedy, patent all your stuff, sue your Mom and kill your neighbour's dog is RIGHT.
Re:This is a very bad trend (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.glasshalfempty.co.uk/ | Last Journal: Saturday December 17 2005, @04:47AM)
So yeah, the GIMP should donate a percentage of their revenues. 15% of 0 is still 0
Re:This is a very bad trend (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.ffii.org/)
By all means.... (Score:4, Funny)
Lets see here, the Gimp's profit is $0, so lets be generous and give them, oh, say a full 20%. So lets see -
0 *
Would you like that in Check, Cash or PayPal?
Re:By all means.... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://someguy456.computed.net/ | Last Journal: Monday May 19 2003, @11:59AM)
Re:This is a very bad trend (Score:4, Insightful)
Noonan: That's a difficult question, I don't have the answer to that. I have to defer that to our legal team.
Of course, just to be safe, it might be wise for the GIMP developers (as well as all other open source image processing projects which use JPG) to volunteer to donate a percentage of their revenues to Forgent Networks.
Interpretation: "Of course, if you were to give us some of your revenues, we'd be more inclined to leave you alone." Sounds like an implied threat to me for protection money.
Re:Why go after the GIMP? (Score:4, Informative)
Copyright DOES NOT require the holder to actively persue violators. Neither do patents or trade secrets.
Only TRADEMARKS have any requirement for the holder to actively persue violations. Even that isn't a requirement to go to court, and often trademarks can be defended just by reminding people who use them as though they were generic that they are not.
IP can't fall in the same category, as it is the broader category that (according to some theories of law), covers all the others just mentioned. The written law doesn't deal directly with IP, but instead deals seperately with those specific parts. That way, there is no such thing as a generic IP violation. This is a good thing, or more lawyers would be trying to stretch the law so they could sue over some sort of unlimited time, no requirements to register, my client doesn't have to prove anything cause it's secret Generic IP violation. So far, SCO is the only bunch to try for soemthing like that.
Re:This is a very bad trend (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday November 08 2004, @10:00AM)
Welcome to 2004.
Knowledge today is nothing more then a simple object of value. Patents, IP, and the whole are used as sleeper agents lately. You patent something extremely broad today and in 10 years, you fuck up everyone by sueing people left and right. That's normal these days and basically not much to worry about. After all, the big companies in IT at the moment got in their current position by other means. Google by sheer usefulness, IBM by overpowering all mainframe competition over time, Microsoft by succesfully ripping of good ideas, etc. If you look at the Fortune 500 list, who in that list made and kept his fortune by starting silly lawsuits? ( lawyers dont start lawsuits, they just porfit from them. Immensely. )
Re:This is a very bad trend (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://jordanhenderson.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 02 2006, @08:53PM)
From the GPL [fsf.org]:
Note the phrase "conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise)..."
By agreeing to "donate" to a patent holder, you might be endangering your rights to distribute under the GPL.
Re:This is a very bad trend (Score:5, Informative)
(http://spiritraveller.blogspot.com/)
NF: Would a free software program that stores images in JPG format, like the GIMP, be violating your IP rights by using JPG?
Noonan: That's a difficult question, I don't have the answer to that. I have to defer that to our legal team.
Of course, just to be safe, it might be wise for the GIMP developers (as well as all other open source image processing projects which use JPG) to volunteer to donate a percentage of their revenues to Forgent Networks.
This was placed at the end of the interview.
My impression is that these were not Noonan's words, but the closing statement of the interviewer... a writer for an open source oriented web site, who obviously has a sense of humor about the issue...
Re:This is a very bad trend (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.lookuplaws.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 18, @06:33PM)
Those "good old days" were the days when your parents worked their asses off to provide stuff for you to use.
Patent disputes have been going on as long as there have been patents - Hollywood was founded in California because IP law wasn't strictly enforced in California, (like it was in New York) and so the MPAA could get around patents on the film camera. [wired.com]
Re:This is a very bad trend (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the issue here is that in the long run monopoly is always bad for an economy. I realize that patents, copyrights, etc. are necessary to give inventors and innovators some incentive to put new products on the market, especially in the case of small inventors who would simply be gobbled up as soon as their bigger larger competitors reverse engineered their product (or co-opted their ideas in the case of copyright law.)
However, the point is to give just enough time that you promote innovation but not too much time so you don't stifle competition (in the case of patents) or cultural history (in the case of copyright). It's important to realize that the length of time that is appropriate here varies wildly from industry to industry. In the case of software patents (we'll assume for the moment that they aren't a stupid idea in the first place), for example, the industry moves so quickly that a patent shouldn't last any longer than two years. That's plenty of time for a piece of software to grab a niche in the market. It's also a good way to avoid stealth patents like this JPEG one. 20 years for something like an image compression algorithm is just ridiculous.
In the old days, folks could easily have gotten around this by just moving to a country where you can't patent something like a compression algorithm and continue to make improvements in signal compression technology. At the same time, the country that did allow that patent would suddenly find itself falling behind in the technology world because it enforces laws that stifle innovation.
Nowadays, the big countries are trying to escape this problem not by creating legal environments that encourage having an intelligent, innovative population but by trying to force their Faustian bargain on the whole world through international trade laws (which is how the USA got the DMCA). Which is sad - instead of saying, "hey, everyone else out there is growing really fast, maybe we should grow really fast, too", the western world has decreed that the entire species must grow slowly.
And the thing that gets me most of all is that the whole IP thing is so similar to a classic prisoner's dilemma that I can't believe it isn't more painfully obvious to people. Then again, maybe it is, and it's just that the people who get to make decisions about IP law aren't interested in being better off in an objective sense; they're just interested in making sure they will always do better than everyone below them.
The real question is... (Score:2, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 20 2004, @05:23AM)
Abolish patents. (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 10 2004, @02:36PM)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.metlin.org/ | Last Journal: Friday July 20, @01:58PM)
Following this, Forgent has issued licensing claims to Adobe, Pixar, Kodak and a few other companies.
"Share a moment, share a life, for just $699!" is the new tagline for the company.
Still applicable? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.dhanapalan.com/)
Re:Still applicable? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still applicable? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.moviepig.com/)
If the original owners let the patent "leak" into the public domain (effectively, per the Doctrine of Laches), then such would be the condition of the patent as purchased by the new company. The patent's virginity wouldn't reinstate any more than Britney's.
(But IANAL, dammit.)
Laches? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, generally past enforcement patterns (i.e. non-enforcement and selective enforcement) has nothing to do with the patent rights. AFAIK, if you've paid the patent fees, it's still your patent and you can still sue over infringment. This is unlike trademarks, where all sorts of things can affect the validity of your trademark (for example, if a trademark holder users their mark as a verb rather than a proper noun, it might not stand up in court).
However, there is the legal concept of laches [reference.com], which MIGHT provide protection against past damages. If it applied to patents, then if a company was aware of a particular infringment, showed negligance by failing to enforce their patent (i.e. sue the infringer), then comes back much later and decides to sue, the infringer couldn't be held responsible for past damages (although they could still be ordered to stop infringing, etc.). This is all in theory though, I'm not sure if this has been tested in court with regard to patents. And IANAL.
If anyone knows more about this, feel free to enlighten me.
Personally... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it matters. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Most digital cameras save their pictures as JPEGs. I happen to enjoy being able to use/adjust those pictures under Linux.
Re:Personally... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Sure it's open source, and that's great, but it was never intended as JPEG replacement! JPEG is a lossy compression and can reduce the size of a photographic image much further than a lossless compression - that's why it was invented to begin with. PNG is intended as a GIF replacement for images like drawings and diagrams that have large areas of the exact same color.
You might as well say to use TIFF as use PNG - both will store high color images with perfect quality, but they'll be huge compared to JPEG. Bandwidth ain't free folks - having images ten times their previous size can sink a busy website. Now, finally some may say "but PNG supports lossy compression too" - yep, it's sure does - by using JPEG compression!
Re:Personally... (Score:4, Insightful)
I find that my pngs are about 3x the size of my jpgs.
On the other hand, I also find that I have vastly more than 3x the disk space, processor speed, and bandwidth than I had back when jpegs were first coming into wide use. So, all things considered, relatively speaking, pngs aren't really huge at all.
Oh come on.. stop worrying already. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday December 06 2004, @10:11AM)
Number two: What is to be gained by going after the Gimp? Want to becoming the next SCO? Only there is even less money in the Gimp than in Linux.
Re:Oh come on.. stop worrying already. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.metlin.org/ | Last Journal: Friday July 20, @01:58PM)
Nothing. Except that this would set a VERY bad precedent.
People will start suing works that are OpenSource all over the place citing some vague-o patents that they may not even have claims to, and kill such projects.
If a conglomerate of litigation happy powerful companies got together, they can cause quite a harm, and fuck things up.
Its not the fact that they are targeting Gimp *in particular* thats wrong - its the fact that they are targeting anybody at all (okay, anybody OpenSource).
JPEG 2000 (Score:1)
(http://www.dhanapalan.com/)
One might say... (Score:2)
Don't worry (be happy) (Score:3, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 12 2006, @03:31PM)
Shaky legal ground forming? (Score:1, Interesting)
Suck (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://seventhcycle.net/)
What I AM worried about, is what sort of long-reaching implications this has for GD [boutell.com]. I use GD regularly in order to manipulate images via the web, and something like this would most likely cause JPEG support to be entirely removed from the project until the worldwide patent expires.
They did it with GIF.
This sucks, because usually I've come to expect future versions of software to have MORE functionality, not less. I hope the Joint Photographic Experts Group really does have prior art.
USPTO as a tiny ice cream truck (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday May 06 2005, @02:21PM)
At least this company is attacking big companies that can defend themselves. I'm surprised they're not going the PanIP route and going after small companies, settling for miniscule amounts from a large number of defendants. Or would that stragegy backfire?
Some of this old documentation is screwy (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there not a central registry on who owns what, instead of just an initial record of a patent being granted to company X, and finding out who owns it requires looking through the transitions of different companies as pieces of the IP are sold off over time.
If everything was kept up to date AS THE SALES HAPPENED it would all be so much easier, no disputes, a nice paper trail of just who owns what.
I bet some of these patent companies buy up IP in the hope they have something worthwhile, but will never know what they're truly entitled to without it being decided by a court... and since information can be absent there, that can get it wrong
Re:Some of this old documentation is screwy (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday August 02 2005, @06:55PM)
Not just the GIMP (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
But in the end, it will be a lot like the GIF mess a few years back.
Instead of making a quick buck they pretty much made GIF irrelevant.
They thought that since it was so ingrained into the graphics world people would just penny up
Making money on ones inventions is ok, dont get me wrong.. But doing it THIS way just isnt 'right'.
Just to be safe... (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.fifth-essence.net/)
Just to be safe... because of course, we wouldn't like something bad to happen to you...
Ok, JPEG is proprietary, but (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday January 15 2004, @06:55PM)
Anyone knows about JEPG2000???
Re:Ok, JPEG is proprietary, but (Score:4, Informative)
JPEG2000 also has patents that cover it. However, the JPEG group claims that they have obtained waivers from all such patent holders, so everything should be OK. The CORE contains 27 patents from 11 companies that have been licenced free of charge to the JPEG group under ISO guidlines, and, as such, can be used freely by anybody implementing the JPEG 2000 part-1 standard.
However, Part-2 of the standard, which contains several enhancments to the core, does contain a single patent that is not free, but avalible under RAND (Reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. However, Part-2 is not necessary for JPEG2000 functionality...I'm not sure what exactly Part-2 contains, in fact...
On the other hand, these exact same guidelines were applied to the JPEG standard. Of course, the JPEG group itself says that the JPEG patent that the article is about isinvalid, as the JPEG standard predates the patent in question.
Really his quote? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.chriseineke.com/ | Last Journal: Friday January 06 2006, @04:23PM)
Is this actually part of that guy's answer? It looks more like a sarcastic remark of the poller.
Well, at least I hope it is....
Not all bad for the GIMP... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday March 28 2004, @08:38AM)
Because of this news, I finally got off my @ss and installed the GIMP. I had been using Paint Shop Pro, which is good and all for what I want it for, but it ain't libre. Mozilla, Gaim, and GIMP. Now if I can just kick the Windows habit.
Can't take "Gimp" seriously after Pulp Fiction (Score:4, Funny)
(http://finnbiff.multiply.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday May 12 2007, @10:04AM)
Maynard: But the Gimp's sleeping.
Zed: Well, I guess you better go and wake him up then.
Oh, great. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://kradeleet.com/)
ridiculous patent, but that isn't even the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday April 12 2004, @04:18AM)
However, even more serious is that the company has waited until the last year that the patent is in effect trying to enforce it. Under current regulations, that seems to be possible, but there is no reason why we should not change the laws and regulations.
We really need to arrive at a legal principle that companies need to actively enforce their patents when they become aware of violations, or otherwise lose patent protection altogether. For something of the size and importance of the JPEG standard, the company should have known within a few years of its adoption that it may infringe their patent.
Re:ridiculous patent, but that isn't even the prob (Score:5, Informative)
The original company did, and waived any claim over JPEG (not to the patent, just that they would not claim for its use in JPEG). But there's no legal mechanism for writing such conditions into the patent, so when Forgent bought the company and obtained the patent, they were not bound by the wishes of the original company. It's almost the same as with copyright - the copyright holder can put any conditions he likes on the work, including 'I retain the copyright but do what you like with it', but unless he actually states that he is releasing it to the public domain, someone who later obtains the copyright can change those conditions.
Look who's on their target list - Bwahahahah!!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Lined up as defendants are: Adobe Systems, Agfa Corporation, Apple Computer , Axis Communications Incorporated, Canon USA, Concord Camera Corporation , Creative Labs Incorporated, Dell Incorporated, Eastman Kodak Company, Fuji Photo Film Co USA, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Gateway Inc, Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corp, JASC Software, JVC Americas Corporation, Kyocera Wireless Corporation, Macromedia Inc, Matsushita Electric Corporation of America, Oce' North America Incorporated, Onkyo Corporation, PalmOne Inc, Panasonic Communications Corporation of America, Panasonic Mobile Communications Development Corporation of USA, Ricoh Corporation, Riverdeep Incorporated (d.b.a. Broderbund), Savin Corporation, Thomson SA, Toshiba Corporation and Xerox Corporation.
Drop the plugin (Score:2, Insightful)
developers just drop jpeg support then? I mean
the are other image formats out there. This
might just be the catalyst to make
even more popular.
Gimp shmimp (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
What's the patent for anyway? DCT? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.theparticle.com/)
DCT, quantization, and Huffman.
quantization is just lossy scailing (how they can patent scailing?). Huffman is patent free. That leaves DCT, but isn't that just _very basic_ transform?
And if they parent jpeg, doesn't it also mean they have the rights to low/high pass image filters?
Am I missing something? (sorry, don't really wanna read through the patent to figure out... would just like to get a quick clue on what's this all about...)
We Should Not Be Surprised (Score:1)
(http://plato.stanford.edu/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 15 2005, @10:46AM)
What will happen to my patent? (Score:1, Funny)
So far, my working prototype is a lawnmower blade attached to the crankshaft of a 600 ft. lb. Detroit Deisel engine. The real trick, so far, is not making the design smaller and portable, but making it safer to use on the other side for the bikini line. A practical analogy, to this design problem, would be the discomfort associated while mowing the lawn and running over a twig.
Merge them all (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.geocities.com/tablizer | Last Journal: Saturday March 15 2003, @01:22PM)
This is what we get . . . (Score:2, Informative)
Then again.......... (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.this-way-out.net/)
The nuisance of it all!
Oh wait....
No time - Got my own patent lawsuits (Score:2)
(http://rixstep.com/)
I am namely the inventor of the 'serif', or actually not me, but my good friend Christopher Lambert, who bequeathed the patent to me because he always felt I'd inspired him to patent the idea in the first place.
We were walking out back of my place in Queensland, Australia, and a sheep passed us by. The sheep had just - you know - and there was still a dingleberry hanging from its - you know - and I pointed it out to Christopher.
'Hey Chris! Look what's there!" I said, pointing to the sheep's dingleberry.
'If there's a name for it I sure don't know!' Christopher replied.
But of course there's a name for it. In both Australian and American. Whatever: Christopher swears he got the idea for the serif from that conversational exchange. And he patented it.
So now anyone not using a Swiss font has to pay ME. Or so I figure. But this will be in the court system for a LONG time - and I'll be in court rooms for about as long, so I don't have time to discuss this JPEG thing.
But I ran into Darl in the corridors and he says to say hello.
Possible workaround (Score:2)
JNG (Score:1)
in 10 years, inventions stop (Score:1)
Re:PNG to the rescue!!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:PNG (Score:1)
(http://nilobject.com/)
Disk space, ram, etc. (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.barbieslapp.com/)
No matter how much bandwidth you have, it is still limited.
Re:PNG (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.geocities.com/tablizer | Last Journal: Saturday March 15 2003, @01:22PM)
You are telling slashdotters that they should live with 200,000 porn images instead of 1,000,000? That'll go over like Steve Balmer at a Linux convention.
Someone would patent PNG or parts thereof (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:At least we still have PNG (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean "Who needs _lossy_ images"?
> Sure, they're huge, but you've got broadband, right?
Photographs ought to be stored using lossless compression anyway. Who wants to worry about slowly degrading the quality of their images with repeated editing and re-saving?
If PNGs are too huge, why not reduce the color bit depth or scale it down? (for internet transfer)
Re:At least we still have PNG (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ferion.net/ | Last Journal: Monday May 06 2002, @02:16AM)
A decent JPEG encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the image, and cameras aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with. Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply. The simple answer is to save the JPEG as a lossless image (like
"Images on (some) web pages probably don't need to be very high quality (applies to both, I guess)."
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to
"Lossy compression feels dirty (like mp3 vs. flac)."
Comparing JPG to MP3 is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their jpegs down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable. However,for stuff like showing digital photos on the web, you just can't see the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using. I know this because I've run a difference filter on various images compressed with JPEG. The difference is so subtle. It's not like MP3 which is compressed enough that you can hear the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing Mp3 at 500kbits to Flac. At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
JPEG is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
Re:PNG (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday April 25 2004, @11:49AM)
It will at least be many years before everyone has broadband internet, and even then, serving content over the internet costs money and this is, in the end, based entirely on the quantity of data transferred. A huge web site, serving millions of images a day, may see its bandwidth bill soar by a factor of 10 if they switched exclusively to lossless compression for images. For instance, Google Image search, which has to serve the thumbnail images for search results. These are low-quality, small images to allow the user to quickly pick an image that seems interesting. JPEG, or another lossy compression format, is perfect for this.
I really would like to see an open-source lossy image compression format, like an Ogg for images, though. I wish I were knowledgable enough to work on this myself.
Re:At least we still have PNG (Score:1)
Re:please stop using "impact" as a verb (Score:1, Funny)
Grade D+
I have made the following corrections to your poorly written grammar below. Changes are noted in bold face text.
BEGIN EDIT
Learn the fucking difference between "effect" and "affect", and use the proper word rather than injecting a "straight up" wrong word, in an attempt to disguise your incompetence, laziness, or whatever it is that makes people abuse a perfectly good noun that way.
Thank you.
END EDIT
Thank you. Bitch...
Re:PNG (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Wednesday September 14 2005, @03:46AM)
Jpeg - lossy, use on photos (has lossless mode in the standard even though not always implemented)
Png - lossles, designed for art/cartoon/human created images.
I have a couple of posts earlier about this so I won't go into it further to save people from hearing the full rant all 3 times
Mycroft
Re:Does anyone remeber the Scientific Renaissance? (Score:2)
(http://www.bearcave.com/)
I agree that the patent system is broken. It is difficult to do any work in compression or image processing and not run into a patent. Apparently this has hampered the JPEG 2000 work. It seems to have taken them a long time to settle on the wavelet function for the standard. I've been told that this was due to patent concerns.
Lest you think this is idle thought, let me tell you that I worked on things in the late 70's and early '80's that will invalidate whatever patents that many other people have already patented to exclude others from making money on them. Watch closely, you'll recognize them when you see them.
I have to say that your post comes across as pretty egotistical. You did all this seminal work and its going to invalidate lots of patents? First off, you're posting as an Anonymous Coward. We'll never know. And did you actually publish this work so that it can be shown that "all those patents" run into prior art? If you did not publish, then you're simple a legend in your own mind.