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."

Comments

1992?

[melquiades]

Apple introduced a function called "CopyDeepMask" into their API in ... I'm not sure ... certainly by System 7, maybe by 6. 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? Does it matter it pattent law?

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?

[hearingaid]

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...

[Bonker]

Now that I've finally weaned myself completely away from the GIF file format, PNG is having patent problems. Let's add another line to "Software Patents are bad, M'kay?"

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...

[Tsar]

You know how, when you type the last character that'll fit on the last line in a text window, the top line disappears, all the other lines move up one, and the cursor appears in the first position of a new blank line?

IBM has a patent on that.

Outdated, irrelevant facts w/o more info

[90XDoubleSide]

The patent statement was last updated in July, and in October Apple made a public statement that they would no longer support any patent agreement for web standards except royalty-free. Does anyone else see problems in the reporting here?

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 ;)

Apple's 10-K

[Dr. Awktagon]

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, under "PATENTS, TRADEMARKS, COPYRIGHTS AND LICENSES":

The Company currently holds rights to patents and copyrights relating to certain aspects of its computer systems, peripheral systems, and software. [...] Although the Company believes the ownership of such patents, copyrights, and trademarks is an important factor in its business and that its success does depend in part on the ownership thereof, the Company relies primarily on the innovative skills, technical competence, and marketing abilities of its personnel.

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.

Re:FUD?

[Guy Smiley]

Seems to be pure FUD, AFAICS. I'm on all of the PNG lists, and while there was a brief flurry of
discussion about this at the same time the whole W3C RAND licensing issue was a big deal, there has
not been anything since then (unless, of course I was unsubscribed from the PNG lists without my
knowledge, hard to tell when you get a few hundred
linux-kernel emails a day).

In any case, no threats from Apple ever about PNG, just speculation and pre-emptive prior art
gathering on the part of the PNG group.

Re:Only applies to triple alpha channels

[mmp]

If that is the case, then there is prior art in the shading language of the RenderMan standard, which was first published in 1988. (RenderMan is a general 3d graphics api that pixar was pushing as a standard many years ago; now their renderer is also known as RenderMan.)

Anyway, in the shading language, surface shaders set an output color and opacity, both as RGB. To generate the final image, these are then blended the obvious way, from the Porter and Duff paper that other people have referenced. Here is a link to PDF of the spec, and here is a direct link to information about surface shaders.

Now, the amusing thing about all this is that the prior art here is from Pixar, which of course shares the same CEO as Apple...

-matt

Great! So now what?

[sterno]

Now this leads to the ongoing quandry of patent law that nobody seems to have a good solution for. Let us assume for the moment that we have iron clad evidence of prior art, the only way to overturn the patent is a court challenge. Court challenges cost money.

Big corporartions won't challenge a patent in court because there's a huge financial disincentive to do it. They could spend years in court and blow tons of money and still possibly lose. On the other hand, the patent holder will license the patent to them for a less exhorbitant sum. If Adobe had to pay to license PNG from Apple, they'd just pay the fee and pass the extra cost directly to the consumer and not bat an eye.

The people who have the most to gain from challenging patents are small ISV's because they can hardly afford to be dumping limited resources into royalties. That problem is made even more complicated when you are talking about open source development. Of course they can neither afford royalty payments nor the court costs and time necessary to fight the patent. If a patent is going to expire in 4 or 5 years, why bother fighting because by the time you get through the courts it won't matter anymore.

The end result of this is that innovation by small software vendors and open source developers is totally crippled by patents. Whether a patent is for a legitimate innovation or not is irrelevant to these groups because as soon as it gets approved and somebody demonstrates a willingness to enforce it, it becomes off limits to these groups.