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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."
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
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?
Have you read this linked page? Have you read any statements made by Apple that they are using this patent to prevent you from using the PNG format?
If you look at that page, you will see that Apple does offer a license for the patent as part of the SVG 1.0 patent which is being put together. It looks like they are just being cautious in order to keep their rights to the patent intact, but still allow it to be used for PNG and SVG.There are plenty of greedy corporations out there and Apple may in fact be one, but don't assume they are without looking at all the facts. Take a look at the sites listed in this article, write to Apple and ask questions, express your thoughts to Apple. If you are not then satisfied with what you see then you can make as much noise about it as you want. Making a big deal about this just because someone has implied wrongdoing on Apple's part is just being a follower.
Sapere aude!
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
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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.