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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."
the hypocrisy around here getting irritating. Since it was apple doing it, they are asked to explain their actions. Anyone else (read microsoft) would do something like this, there would be outrage.
- 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.Has Apple actually made any threats on this, or did someone just find this statement and see it as a possible precursor to a threat?
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.
What do we do about it? Nothing. In fact a lot of us contribute to Apple. Hint. Stop posting
Apple press releases on slashdot.
Here is a good example from on of my
Apple Threatens Open Source Theme Project
Apple moves to again to squash look-alikes.
Themes removed at Apples behest.
Apple Advertises '1-click' licensing.
Apple sues to stop leaks.
This type of behavior needs to stop. Now. Think different. Indeed!
I know that a lot of people here are excited about Apple's use of Darwin/*BSD in MacOSX. I think this is invalid. Apple couldn't build their own OS so they use choose *BSD to gain market share.
There really isn't anything wrong with this. It was a logical decision on their part. I just wanted to point out that this in NO way invalidates there bad, unfair, and rude behavior.
...Remember that corporations are amoral. Not moral or immoral but amoral. They logically determine how to make the most money. They make decisionswithout regard to compassion or ethics, much like a computer.
This explains the BSD decision but this also explains the RAND decision.
Unless we stand up an say NO this behavior will continue.
Peace.
Kevin
> It seems un-American, bordering on the Communist to suggest that Apple should simply give away their intellectual property.
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.
You know the funny thing. Porter and Duff still work for Pixar and share the same CEO as Apple...
I think the Porter/Duff paper is the last word on compositing.
jeff
You would think so, yet here we are. This is the crux of the current distaste for many patents.
The Constitutional purpose of patents is not to make money but to promote progress in science and the useful arts. Patenting the trivial or obvious or patenting prior art (this one seems to include both cases) is detrimental to progress in science or any other field.
Patenting things which are prior art is also detrimental to capitalism, since it increases the risk of lawsuits if not actual damages and limits genuine innovation. *Bogus* patents are antithetical to "making money" in both the short and long term, unless you're a lawyer. They're no different than the mob's "protection" rackets.
I posted this before as AC, but since it didn't get any points, I thought no one would see it, and I _do_ think it might help.
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
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
is truly an American:
It seems un-American, bordering on the Communist to suggest that Apple should simply give away their intellectual property.
<aside> What the do you mean, exactly, by "un-American" -- "doubleplus ungood"? or is it closer to "un-Italian"?
Were Helen Keller and Jack London un-American because they were socialists? </aside>
Did you ever stop to think that patents are a way for companies to avoid competition? To keep out the little guy?
Many companies have decided that instead of competing on price and quality, they would rather go to the govt. and get an exclusive monopoly to use a certain technology. Because the pace of change in the tech field is so rapid, patents are effectively eternal. And when people criticize this, because they want to see competing products in the marketplace, you call them communists?
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Its a standard which covers a format structure which allows encoding and decoding mechanisms to act on it. It is not an encoding or decoding mechanism itself, but may or may not have requirements for those encoding and decoding mechanisms in order to be official called an PNG decoder. But its the mechanism itself that the patent would apply to. Just as its okay to have gif images, but its the mechanisms to which the compression patent would apply to that would cause the problem.
If no one implemented alpha channels in PNG, it would not be an issue, even though PNG is capable of storing them, and it would look bad. Several other formats implement alpha channels, and so this does not apply to them directly either, only to the mechanisms which use it to do *compositing*.
disclaimer : My views do not represent those of every one else in slashdot.
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.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Have we already forgot the GIF fiasco?
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.
This patent is only good for toilet paper.
Patents are granted by the patent office. They are not Valid until tested in a law court. It is not the patent office's job to determine whether there is prior art. If they know there is, then they will not grant the patent. If they are not certain then they will grant and wait for someone else to challenge (no sense in wasting taxpayer's money).
As others have said, Apple have to maximise the shareholder value or the directors might go to jail. So even if they are certain that there is prior art, they will still file a patent - after all, it may be that no one bothers to challenge. Then, when it turns out Apple accidentally infringes some other, equally worthless, patent, they can do a mutual exchange. The shareholders will be impressed, and the potential for lawsuits reduced.
This is considered sound business practice in the USA.
It may be seen in a different light by the rest of the world, but WTF.
Alpha compositing is dead obvious to even the most naive thinker
This argument is raised every time there is a patent dispute discussed on slashdot yet I'm always a little uncomfortable with it. We say something is "obvious" but we say so many years after it was invented (perhaps) and patented; years during which we have used it and become familiar with the concept. Was it really obvious when it was developed and patented or has it only become "obvious" because of it's subsequent widespread use and our consequent familialarity with the concepts involved?
In this particular case I suspect that the concept was indeed obvious by 1992 when the patent was issued - that seems pretty late in the game for such a basic concept in computer graphics. If it was obvious it won't be hard to find prior art. But in general we should recognise that concepts that are obvious to us now after long use were often breakthrough innovations obvious to no one when they were first developed.
Oh, the horror! The unethical behaviour!
;)
;)
(Of course, it is perfectly legal to take out a patent, but don't let that stop you from throwing a tizzy fit.
Yes I know, slashdotters view software patents like Microsoft views the GPL (of course Microsoft is wrong, but that doesn't stop them either). But before the Great Slashdot Hornet Swarm decends en masse on poor Apple, I'd like to point a few things out:
1) The patent dates back to 1992. According to O'Reilly's "Web Design in a Nutshell", PNG only dates back to January-February 1995. You'd think that if someone was starting a new graphics file format on which the future of the web depended, they'd check around for patents they might be violating first. Seems like common sense to me, especially since they are billing the format as "patent free".
2) None of the links in the parent posting pointed to anything that explicitly stated that Apple was refusing to license its patented technology to PNG or sending them cease and desist orders. I could not find anything on Google or on Apple's web site to support this. What I did find was this statement at "http://www.apple.com/about/w3c/" (part of Apple's statement in support of royalty free W3C standards:
"While the current draft patent policy does state a "preference" for
royalty-free standards, the ready availability of a RAND option
presents too easy an alternative for owners of intellectual property
who may seek to use the standardization process to control access to
fundamental Web standards. A mandatory royalty-free requirement for
all adopted standards will avoid this result."
One of the links on the Slashdot parent post did refer to lots of companies getting royalty free licensing for this patent. So all the PNG folks need to do, if they haven't already, is ask Apple nicely for their royalty free licensing option, since they are a web file format. End of problem.
3) I know you all really, really hate Apple. But if you are going to make them look evil, you are going to have to try a lot harder next time.
On December 14, 1996, Mothra resurrected an Apple tree.
In 28 days, she will return to see its fruit:
OS X, the Apple of Mothra's Aqua eye.