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PNG Group Unconcerned About Apple's Patent
melquiades writes: "A recent story raised concerns that Apple's patent on some forms of alpha compositing was blocking the development of PNG, MNG and SVG. Not so, says Greg Roelofs, a member of the PNG group: 'The PNG group did discuss the Apple patent several weeks ago, and we decided it was completely irrelevant to PNG itself, almost certainly irrelevant to the pnmtopng utility and to PNGs animated extension, MNG, and probably irrelevant to SVG as well.' Here's the article on OS Opinion. So if it's not a big deal, why was there a general call for prior art to overturn Apple's patent? It looks like some PNG developers got worried, but the core team thinks there's no problem. Is this just a case of the right hand not knowing that the left hand is paranoid?" Once bitten, twice shy?
Its just leftover paranoia from the problem Unisys had with people using the GIF format. The PNG group seems to have a good understanding of the Apple patent, from what I read in the article.
Uh, sorry, what? Is anyone out there still *not* using PNG?
Just because a few of us can read write and do a little math, doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe
It looks to me like the patent covers alpha-masking, not alpha-blending.
As I recall, PNG and SVG both use alpha channels. That is, transparency data is stored as a part of the image's color encoding.
Alpha-masking is different. In this case, an image is defined in the "normal" RGB fashion. Along with it, a second image is stored, which has only alpha information in it, not color. You could say that an alpha channel is inline, whereas an alpha mask is not.
Is the patent ridiculous? Of course it is. But I don't think it would affect PNG and SVG anyway, because they use a different method of storing transparency information.
The OSOpinion article refers to Greg Roelofs'
/. crowd lives for this stuff, I wouldn't presume to imagine that my comments will have any discernable effect on the (flame)festivities. :-) "
:)
forum post. My favorite part of the Roelofs' post is this classic line:
" So I nominate this for the 2001 tempest-in-a-teapot award... But since the
How many posts did that article get the other day?
That's why the call for prior art goes on. Deny that Apple has a case, but build a strong defense against their case. It's the cover-your-bases approach, and, sadly, the only wise one available in the current intellectual property age.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
What's actually relevent is what Apple's lawyers think. It's going to be expensive to fight a legal battle, so expensive that anyone who's been harassed by Unisys has folded, even though there is a fair chance that their patent would be declared invalid if it came up in court.
A while back Apple posted this to their web site. It seems they are against RAND licensing fees. I assume that would also include their own technology, but I am really not sure how all this fits together.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
I use PNG's everyday, as it is the file formate that firework's (macromedia) uses. It contains a "web layer" and when created in firworks you can create "slice guides" and rules. Similair to how a PSD contains layer. The only difference is, I can open a PNG in IE, though I wont see the layers, and it will be a REALLY big file, compared to what it would be if it was exported out as a gif or jpg or I guess a flat PNG.
mediadiva
yes.. and if you do a bit of investigation you'll notice all browsers support them, including IE. In fact, you'll also notice that hordes of websites also use PNGs.
There is practically no decent reason for any website to still be using GIF files as the conversion of both the html and files is pretty easy...
PNGs are also way technically better.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
All in all, simply self induced FUD.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Part of a legal feasibility study has to be a patent infringement analysis. Whether you agree kthat software should be patentable or not, the fact it that in the US it IS patentable. If someone else made it first and was granted the exclusive right to make that product, then you will infringe on their rights if you make the product.
There is simply no excuse for not doing this analysis. Yes, there is some up-front cost to a patent attorney. However, with a large enough development group, this cost can easily be absorbed by the group at a nominal level per member. The potential consequence is that every developer can find themselves defending a patent infringement suit. The last estimate of which I am aware placed the cost of litigating an "average" infringement suit at just around $500,000.00. If the case is deemed "exceptional," the infringers could potentially have to pay the patentee's legal costs as well as their own, on top of paying damages for the patentee's lost profits.
Bottom line: all this can be avoided by getting a noninfringement opinion by a reputable and competent patent attorney. This is a basic software engineering step and should be performed at the very beginning of the development process. The attorney will even be able to suggest ways you can still go forward with the project, but do so in a way that does not infringe on someone else's rights.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Sites that don't use PNG:
www.salon.com, www.userfriendly.org, yahoo.com, www.redhat.com, www.debian.org, www.gnu.org, and of course, www.slashdot.org.
So, who is using PNG?
Je ne parle pas francais.
While we're at it, let's spend all our time and effort preparing to defend PNG against patents on automated shoe manufacturing and quack magnetic therapy devices. After all, "only a court can decide" whether PNG software infringes on those, too.
The patent itself specifically contrasts what it covers with the use of an alpha channel, such as is used by PNG. It is obviously not a threat to anyone who bothers to read the patent.
Aside from that, PNG was designed to avoid patent issues by people who knew what they were doing, in an drawn-out open process where anyone could have pointed out weaknesses. It's based on well-established techniques with a long history of prior art. Your first assumption should be that any patent either doesn't affect PNG, or is so blatantly invalid that nobody would ever dare take it to court, not that there's trouble ahead because a one-line description of a patent sounds vaguely like something PNG does.
You can't live your life shrieking in terror every time someone whispers "patent."
The problem isn't just that the system isn't great (or designed with software development in mind, and therefore ill suited for it), but also that the system is horribly implemented, with those deciding on validity of patents being filed, knowing very little about them and generally ending up granting them.
Of course inventors should be paid - but what's an invention? The theme right now seems to be "quick, patent it before everyone else thinks of it" whereas it was supposed to be "patent it so others don't steal it from you."
There is absolutely no reason one the first company to patent an obvious thing should have exclusivity to it. (and of course the whole thing is weighted very heavily against open source development, but that's a different issue)
sic transit gloria mundi
One way that the Open Source community could help fight software patents is to establish a database of prior art. When issues like this come up, relavant prior art would be hyperlinked to the supposed patent.
Just for the record (not that this is scientific or anything) my current ~/.netscape/cache has
- 65 PNGs,
- 1,188 GIFs, and
- 170 JPGs
in it. I suspect that might be a little higher than average in the PNG department because I tend to frequent sites run by rabid free software rebels. YMMVWhat were you compressing? Photographs?
:(
They're not intended to replace JPEG[*] they're best suited for application where you would use a GIF. As with GIF the compression is lossless and best for compressing line art and simple computer generated stuff.
In addition to GIF you also get:
* > 256 colours
* Full 8 bit alpha channel (but not in IE on Windows
Then there's MNG - for animated PNGs like animated GIFs and [*] JNG which in a PNG which internally uses uses JPEG compression and thus is pretty good with photos. These are more obscure though. I think JNG might allow transparency/alpha channel, which would be cool, as regular JPEG does not.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
READ THE PATENT. And not just the claims, the whole thing. It specifically disclaims alpha-blending, mentioning it as a well known and inferior precursor.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Fear Itself
Misinformation on this matter has caused many open-source advocates to incorrectly accuse Apple of holding back Open Web technologies.
Let's hope that cooler heads prevail and that fear-debunking articles such as this one are more widely read."
It is amazing how worked up everyone got in November when they learned that a company that supports web standards and has a public policy of royalty-free licensing for them (as of October) had responded in June to a call to disclose all patents to the PNG group that they should be aware of for infringement issues in the future.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
If Apple's patent is valid, nothing put out by the PNG group infringes. However, when an application, say, Mozilla, displays a PNG in front of some other graphic and uses the PNG's alpha mask to do partial transparency, that would infringe. Similarly, when a Gnome or KDE desktop displays a PNG icon and uses the partial transparency to have a smooth and not a jagged edge, that would infringe. But just storing the alpha mask in the file doesn't collide with anything in the patent.
In practice, there's so much prior art that the patent will be dead meat once it hits a court. Traditionally, the patent holder deals with this by licensing for a fee small enough that it's cheaper to pay than fight, and in this case, perhaps giving an out to the free software folks, while possibly trying to get a bit of cash from others. But in this case, I suspect that even that strategy is not going to work.