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Apple Patent Blocking PNG Development
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."
Try Porter and Duff's paper published in 1984 introducing image composition that started it all!!!!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
> I'm pretty sure I was looking at that call in 1991, and maybe even 1990. Is 1992 the filing date, or the date they claim invention
The patent law allows one year since the date of public disclosure until the patent is filed. Therefore if you were looking at it in 1991 and they filed patent in 1992, they are still OK.
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.
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.
OK - let's compare features:
GIF: 1 bit alpha (ie On or Off)
PNG: Up to 8 bit Alpha (ie antialiased edges, semi-translucent images, etc)
GIF: 8 bits per pixel of colour (severe image
banding for subtle gradations - inability to match important colours - no pantone possibilities).
PNG: (at least) 8, 16, 24 bits per pixel (cheaper than GIF all the way up to better-than-your-eye-can-resolve).
GIF: Animation.
PNG:
GIF: Fast preview by interlaced download.
PNG: Even faster preview by much more complicated
pixel ordering scheme.
I think PNG wins hands down. The *only* feature
they missed was 'lossy' compression a'la JPEG...and GIF can't do that either.
TIFF is virtually unusable due to wild
proliferation of tags - TIFF images don't
port well from one tool to another.
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
From the Second Edition of "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics", by William M. Newman published by McGraw-Hill in 1979:
:= ColorRaster.ymin to ColorRaster.ymax - 1 do
:= ColorRaster.xmin to ColorRaster.xmax - 1 do
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.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The definitive reference on the history of alpha is Alvy Ray Smith's technical memo 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.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
You seen to forget:
HP, Apple Drop Support for Royalties on Web Standards
Don't you think that is HELPFUL?
I personally think it's rather odd they would state they do not support RAND, then say you have to use RAND for this standard... something is wrong here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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...
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/ is the page on the W3C's site on the subject.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
A patent is valid at most 20 years from the time being filed in the first place (1992 + 20 years). A renewal fee is required every year.
from the W3C Patent statement summary:
...
[snip]
Apple informed the SVG 1.0 Working Group very early in the SVG 1.0 process of the patent they listed in their license statement. The SVG Working Group made a concerted effort to produce a specification that does not require implementors to infringe the patent.
[snip]
Member Name -/-Patent Claim -/- License
Adobe -- None -- Royalty-Free --
Apple -- Patent: US 5379129 -- RAND --
uh, you are aware that this story is about Apple, and not Adobe, right?
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Ah crap, (I cant believe how retarded slashdot is, I did it to fast and it said the "slow down cowboy" BS, when I backed up my text was gone, so I repasted but forget to correct it, grrrr)
i cy-comment/2001Sep/0734.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpol
disclaimer : My views do not represent those of every one else in slashdot.
Do you think the Commodore 64's sprite handling is prior enough? The idea was the same. And it was released MUCH before 1992.
As other posters have mentioned:
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.
The patent only applies to triple alpha channels, i.e., where the alpha channel is itself an RGB value, and the source and destination images are blended channel by channel according to the RGB values in the triple alpha channel.
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!
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
There is nothing colossally more wrong with being able to patent software than there is with patenting hardware.
There's a huge difference between software innovation and hardware innovation. Software innovation is sequential and complementary. 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) 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?
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
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.