Slashdot Mirror
Suddenly a JPEG Patent and Licensing Fee
Michael Long writes "Forgent Networks (www.forgentnetworks.com) has announced that it owns the software patent on JPEG compression technology, and has stated that it is "in contact" with computer, software, camera, and other digital imaging product manufacturers regarding licensing terms. This ambush of the digitial imaging industry will probably stand as the worst public relations nightmare a company can inflict upon itself."
Look how well the online world views Unisys, after all.
How can a company come in at this late date and declare a patent on jpeg? Isn't there prior art?
... I don't think I can afford to have a lien on my porn collection.
Look at all the money the .gif royalties made Compuserve...
Hasn't apple tried this with GIF formats?
Just a company trying to make a quick buck...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
They can't, of course. Nobody judge would let this ruling stand. It's probably jsut a way for the company to exhort money from those it's suing.
By the way, they're trading at 4.42, down 0.08. Their 52 week high was all of 5.67, their 52 week low as 0.80.
Well there is precident (gif).
Maybe something of this magnitude can force everyone to reexamine the current patent situation.
Now is the time to use free software like PNG. Let whomever liscence what they want. Ill just use PNG from now on.
Do I have to pay a license fee for all of my pr0n?
If the lesson is to be learned, We just shouldnt be so overconfident about "free software"
SOB... They just screwed an entire industry...
Tournament Management Online &
if they'v had it all this time then why are they comming out now?
How about JPEG 2000? Are they claiming any rights to this compression scheme? Because to be honest, JPEG 2000 is FAR superior, and it wouldn't take too much effort for companies to say "screw your royalty, we're producing JPEG 2000 cameras, etc. from now on."
But this doesn't surprise me. After MS claimed ownership of parts of OpenGL, that sorta opened the floodgates for really sad attempts to bilk more money out of an already financialy strapped populace/industry.
Realplayer and their constant updating of their file formats, Quicktime and the same, Microsoft and their media formats. When are we going to see proper programs and file formats that remain backwardly compatible, and free to use. It's insane. The internet grew so fast because of sharing of technology. This kind of crap will only stifle it.
How similar is this to the whole Pop-Up-Advertising patent that was applied so late. Nobody thought they would win that - and they did, though there doesn't appear to be much happening with it. This one seems rather difficult to regulate as well.
Abstract: The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for processing signals to remove redundant information thereby making the signals more suitable for transfer through a limited-bandwidth medium. The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in video compression systems. Typically, the system determines differences between the current input signals and the previous input signals using mean-square difference signals. These mean-square signals are processed and compared with one or more thresholds for determining one of several modes of operation. After processing in some mode, the processed signals are in the form of digital numbers and these digital numbers are coded, using ordered redundancy coding, and transmitted to a receiver.
-F-
We already fixed this problem when CompuServe freaked out about GIFs. We all use PNG now for everything.
Next.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
When is the "burn you're JPEGs" day going to be?
Trouble is, there is no PNG-like alternate that's widely accepted, not yet.
why don't the /.erc just patent 'innovative ideas' as a concept, and then we can reap all the benefits of everything in the world and just live forever on the royalties!
goddamn those bastards for trying to charge for .gif, and these new bastards for following suit with .jpg
now using php you can't even create .gifs on teh fly cause of that BS...
Bahhhhhhhhhh!
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
Here is the Patent text at USPTO.
Time to make histories biggest upgrade... Jpeg 2000!
*snort* what is the sound of millions of people flipping these guys off? Most people ignore the GIF compression threats - now we're supposed to fear for JPG suits? What about all the scanners out there whose default settings are to create JPG images? How about the thousands upon thousands of on-line amateur photographers whose thumbnails are in JPG format?
Let's face it: it was tough to change people's minds to use PNG instead of GIF. Do they really think they're going to make headway suing people for using JPG images? From the article:
"We wanted to ensure the investment community and the general public are clear about the terms of our valuable JPEG data compression technology, one of the many technologies we have in our patent portfolio," stated Richard Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer at Forgent. "We are in ongoing discussions with other manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners and other products that use JPEG technology for licensing opportunities."
Like I said, best of luck. I'd love to see this guy get his ass handed to him by the very large companies who use JPG compression.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
The GIF fiasco led to the superior PNG format, will this promote the use of wavelet compression? Assuming a patent-free algorithm exists ... I know there's a bunch of patents on wavelets ...
More of the same, and we will all be just watching!
I never even heard of Forgent until just now!
well, maybe more software will start to support JNG now. unless 'jpeg network graphics' is a copyright violation.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
I thought it was "forget networks" which makes more sense to me somehow.
All my graphics are ".jpg" files.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
- Call them repeatedly at 866/276-FORG (3674) asking if their refrigerator is running.
- Pound www.forgentnetworks.com in the ass repeatedly with any scripts you kiddies might be tempted to use.
Do:- Have them check out that Goatse guy for his espressive use of "their" technologies.
Thank you for your support.NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Hmm...
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
it won't hold up. you know what a pair of roller blades are? yeah, that's right, inline skates, roller blades are a name brand, however because almost EVERYONE calls inline skates roller blades, roller blade lost it's case against all of those people. george lucas is trying to avoid the same thing when he won't let people make movies on the expanded universe, but because of other constraints, he has to allow parodies, if he allowed one serious movies, others could strong arm him into allowing it, scale that back, since .jpeg is a standard, the patent more than likely won't hold, i feel the same way about MS trying to lay claims to the OpenGL standard
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Talk about sneak attack! This crap's gota stop. Companies that use these types of tactics are the lowest form of corporate entity. Waiting until the market is saturated with a technology then announcing you have a patent ought to be illegal or some other remedy needs to be sought to curb this abuse. Again, companies are showing the world what ethics are really about. NADA...
Let another company make a fool of themselves..This move shows absurd arrogance, and will only inflict damage on them. I hope this stuff gives them enough of a bad name to put them out of business. Good riddance.
that ringing you are hearing is the bell tolling for jpeg and forgent.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
Burn all JPEGs, too?
We have to do something
It's Unisys all over again. I'd love to see the look on Forgent Networks' collective faces when Adobe, Kodak, and the rest of the world tells them they don't gif a damn...
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Is PNG the only OS graphics solution than can stand up against GIF and JPEG? It certainly isn't comparible, but maybe events such as these will get the fire going.
The best known standard from JPEG is IS 10918-1 (ITU-T T.81), which is the first of a multi-part set of standards for still image compression. A basic version of the many features of this standard, in association with a file format placed into the public domain by C-Cube Microsystems (JFIF) is what most people think of as JPEG!
For everything else, there's Folgers Crystal Meth
Maybe this type patent nonsense will finally get more companies to see that open standards are in fact a safer way to build their products.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
And this is why RAND is unacceptable in any public standard. Any body making public standards should require all participants to provide a license to anybody using that patent for the purpose of implementing that standard free of charge to all.
Given how patent-encumbered JPEG-2000, MPEG-4 et. al. are, this will seriously interfere with open implementation of these standards.
Would that that would slow their adoption....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Does anyone else think that this is a bit out of hand. I'm not sure what they expect to reap from this, but I wonder why these claims have never been made before. What are the open Alternatives to JPG, in the way that PNG is alternate to GIF?
Already have programs with the "free" JPEG compression included in it? They can't really stop the flow of information... i think compuserve was able to damper GIF because they caught it earlier in it's life, but it's pretty much just a futile attempt for JPEG at this point...
Furthermore, I believe this is a horrible move because now camera companies and what not might start developing propietary image formats in an attempt to save money... can you say "crap image formats everywhere"?
First, they mention owning the patent for all fields of use except satellite broadcast...does that mean that if I'm going to prepare a digital photo for satellite Internet trasmission, their patent doesn't cover it?
Second, they mention declaring that they have / own / control the patent, but they don't mention who developed the technology. Does anybody know if they just bought the patent from someone? Did they actually come up with the technology? Or did they sign a contract with a patent holder who has given them exclusive licensing rights for certain fields of use?
JPEG does appear to be patent-encumbered, by patents such as this one, but I can't find any references to Forgent or the patent number referenced in its press release.
Now that JPEG 2000 has finally been standardized, and more companies are starting
to adopt it as a better JPEG both for compression and image quality;
can't the industry just tell Forgent to stick their patent where the
pixels don't shine?
Yes, I know there would still be a transition period to convert all that Pr0n over.
JPEG what are they sueing over? Their own propritary addition to JPEG? Cause the base is supposed to patent free, only?
Found here, filed October 6, 1987.
First paragraph:
"The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for processing signals to remove redundant information thereby making the signals more suitable for transfer through a limited-bandwidth medium. The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in video compression systems. Typically, the system determines differences between the current input signals and the previous input signals using mean-square difference signals. These mean-square signals are processed and compared with one or more thresholds for determining one of several modes of operation. After processing in some mode, the processed signals are in the form of digital numbers and these digital numbers are coded, using ordered redundancy coding, and transmitted to a receiver."
This ambush of the digitial imaging industry will probably stand as the worst public relations nightmare a company can inflict upon itself.
Rather like the Unisys LZW (GIF) patent fiasco from, when was it, 1994? Or the more recent Fraunhofer MP3-compression patent enforcement?
Either the company will cave in, or the software developers will, and we'll all move on to a different JPEG compression technology. Same as before.
All I want to see is this site slashdotted. Too bad they can afford the bandwidth.
Now is the perfect time for us to consider widespread adoption of Zeosync's miraculous 100-to-1 compression technology.
This will never effect any of us, just like the GIF thing a while back....and even if they tried to "strong arm" their Patent via fees and such, they would be the scourge of the tech world, and someone will just make the next "JPEG" compression scheme....talk about bringing heat to your company....its amazing that companies try this .....especially the weekly occurances of " Hey we have the patent/copytright on hyperlinks " LOL
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
How long will it be before the camera manufactures release cameras using the .PNG format instead of the .JPEG format. How soon before a burn all JIF's page comes online like the burn all GIF's?
http://burnallgifs.org/
The truth shall set you free!
Forgent Networks apparently is pretty forgentful, if they fergont to mention this until now.
Now, the Diaper Genie, there's an invention worthy of its patent.
If you don't collect licensces for your patent immediately, (i.e. within a reasonbale time frame) why do you get to do it years later (after everyone started using because it was free and efficient)?
Shouldn't your patent expire if you don't do anything to collect on it?
My new investment strategy is going to be patents. It certainly seems to be the only thing worth any money besides real estate. Surely there are patents sitting around that you can invest by buying them...
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
it's kinda long. will talk more when i go through the damn thing.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This ambush of the digitial imaging industry will probably stand as the worst public relations nightmare a company can inflict upon itself.
Doesn't really matter. Arguably corporations have more rights than humans these days.
Consider that Microsoft hasn't been punished yet for its monopolistic practices and in the interim is pushing through some pretty Orwellian products.
Consider that earlier on the front page the Baby Bells were given the go-ahead to sell information about its customers' phoning habits.
Consider that depending upon which company you work for that's cooked the books, the government will pay more or less attention to it depending upon the company's political donations.
Consider that the Bush administration is flooded (Bush, Cheney, the SEC and Thomas White) with people in conflicts of interest, and nobody is going to do anything about it.
(Feel free to reply with your own additions to this list...)
In other words, the time might never have been riper to try something like this.
As in: FORGET IT!!!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Well Unisys was allowed to do it, so it's not surprising. Until someone in American government does something to disallow this kind of patent entrapment it will not end.
It matters little how feasible their patent claim is. The very threat of a possible lawsuit is enough to make most companies roll over and cough up licensing fees.
"Referring to FIG. 2, the Differential Pulse Code Modulated (DPCM) loop consists of a cosine transform unit 11, a normalization unit 12, a quantization unit 13, an inverse normalization unit 16, an inverse transform unit 17, a delay memory 18, and a prediction unit 19. In operation, an input pixel block on lines 5 from the present frame is first subtracted in subtractor 10 by its estimation from the previous frame on line 23 on a pixel-by-pixel basis to generate block differences."
Previous frame? Block differences? This reads more like a patent that would affect MPEG. I'd love to see this guy TRY to apply this to JPEG.
They could say this covers EVERYTHING, JPEG, MPEG, PNG, AVI etc etc etc. What the hell is wrong with the US patent office? I hope some high court has the sense to see that this patent is much to broad and will only stifle development.
I might as well jump on the banwagon. I am anouncing today that I will be seeking the patent rights to the .html and .txt file formats. I will make you all pay dearly! ;)
I say we all call in anonymous tips to the BSA, about stolen software, illegal mp3 caches, etc, at FORG. Given that we all know there's a 100% certainty of the BSA-goons finding at least one or two unauthorized files, it could well end up costing them enough to let them understand just how much pain they're getting themselves into by being such morons....
you mean its not? Damn, what network are we talking about again? I forget....
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I guess now is the time for PNG (and MNG) to really shine.
There is a distinct difference between a trademark (Rollerblade) and a patent. If a patent is granted, then it is legally the "property" of the person who filed it. Lack of protection for a patent does not run the risk of losing the patent, whereas it does with a trademark. They are entirely different.
Does this affect mp3, mpeg, Divx :-) or other standards which were built off of the original jpeg standard?
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Sony already ponied up US$15 million to "license" it from forgent. This accounted for the majority of their US$22 million dollar earnings statement for this past financial quarter.
I wonder what the Free Software Foundation is going to do about their images now :-/
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
note: Ogg tarkin is going to use wavelet compression. So yes a patent free algorithm exists.
Does ths mean we can start www.burnalljpegs.org?
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
I wonder if this well help spread the use of PNG compression, and maybe get internet explorer to support it correctly too.
Why does patent law allow this? JPEG has been around for YEARS! This is not something that somebody started using yesterday. This company sat on its hands while it waited for the format to become so entrenched and standardized that the rest of the world would have no choice but to accept some form of licensing agreement.
I say, if you have a patent on something, you have a limited amount of time to claim infringement after the infringement is discovered. This way, the overall damage is minimized and other formats can be adoped or created if necessary. If this company honestly didn't know it had a patent on JPEG, it probably was a waste of money to begin with.
Its one thing to allow the most obvious ideas to be patented, but its quite another to allow someone to take advantage of a patent to fleece entire industries. That's borderline fraud.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Reminds me of the widespread terror of the usage of GIFs a few years ago. Things have died down around that one, and it would seem that nothing happened (at least that has bothered me in anyway) to restrict GIF usage. Then again, Unisys (the patent holder) was a company I had heard of before and had something to lose. This new development with JPEGs seems to be from a company who's desparate to make a buck.
burnallgifs.org
./jpg2png -R porn/*
it's GD the graphics library, which is used by php to generate graphics... and even then you can look for an older version of libGD if you REALLY need to make GIF images... though in my opinion PNG is the better format.
--Ks9
So here we go, plugging up the courts in a grab for cash... I'd sure be interested in what the law firm's percentage is on whatever they get awarded/negotiate.
PNG - Prior Art - GIFs. Use em, find em.
I can't stand lossy compression schemes. How would you like it if you linux kernel was "almost as good" as the original, like mp3 and jpg are?
If you check at jpeg.org, you will find that the original patent for jpeg compression has been put in the public domain by the original patent holder.
Previous work
Excellent JPEG INFO FAQ.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/
The JPEG standard was designed by the "Joint Photographic Experts Group"
This patent is either totally off base, or someone is playing games with the patent system. There is no way that this patent will stand up as is.
~ kjrose
Did the WIPO get there evil little way and make US patents that would not be granted in other countries applicable in those countries?
In the UK/europe you cann't (yet) patent
Gene sequences,
Computer Software
Business Models
etc....
So why the hell should countries that don't allow that kind of patent bother to act on them.
Move all your R+D &co out-side the US when you want to avoid US laws like DMCA and stupid patents
Even better lobby the government whatever county you in not to accept those stupid patents.
I have never read the JPEG patent but using applied first principles I could probably come up with several lossy/non-lossy compression algoithms that violate that patent. There no real added value in applying first principles.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
A quick read suggests that this might also cover aspects of MPEG encoding. Now maybe they have assessed that those rights have been given away - but this might only be the first shot in an ongoing battle for them; trying to get some money to offset their financial position.
Far be it from me to suggest that people take advantage of the supplied email address to make their feelings known to this company of chancers.
You must be new here.
Man, what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where these yahoo's go into Redmond and tell Microsoft they owe them a royalty for every version of IE, Office, and any other program that can read JPG's. They'll be lucky if Ballmer doesn't have their company bought or sued into the ground by the time they get their parking validated.
You call yourself a pr0n collector? You bring shame to that title!
Patent law has a condition which makes this whole thing somewhat moot:
If the holder of a patent does not protect it, they simply lose it. JPEG has been implemented by companies too numerous to mention without a peep from the patent holder, and a judge will ask the plaintiff what, if anything, they did to protect their rights.
Even if the patent was a "submarine" patent, the enforcement of the patent is still the responsibility of the patent holder, as supported by patent law.
In all likelyhood, somebody in the holder's organization inventoried the currently held IP and found this gem. To prove "prior art" the defendant(s) of any case should cite the various browsers, apps, other digital artifacts and hope the judge isn't a total luddite.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
I'm not sure when the JPEG standard really started becoming popular, but I was still in Junior high when the patent was created and at that time the internet was still mainly text based.
Could it be that they haven't been enforcing their rights as the patent holder? Or maybe they recently purchased Compression Labs so they could get money for royalties?
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
I thought the J in JPEG stood for "Joint". How did the other folks in the JPEG group not know about this from the beginning?
Okay, can someone clear this up for me... according to the JPEG FAQ: "JPEG (pronounced "jay-peg") is a standardized image compression mechanism. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name of the committee that wrote the standard."
The JPE group is a sub-committee of the ISO organization, see here. They claim that: "... a basic version of the many features of this standard, in association with a file format placed into the public domain by C-Cube Microsystems (JFIF) is what most people think of as JPEG."
So if the ISO experts group wrote the standard, how come it could be patented by this company? Is C-Cube somehow a part of or associated with Forgent? Surely placing the algorithm in the public domain is at least prior art that will invalidate this patent?
What am I missing here?
Sailing over the event horizon
If the patent has existed since 1986, doesn't it expire at the end of 2003?
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
1. Patent law makes you enforce your patents. If you don't, you lose them. And Patents don't last that long anyway
2. PNG, anyone?
If you think back way back, there was an article on /. about the UNISYS patent dispute over GIF, claiming ownership and rights to the format. If you look on these bastard's website they are using GIF. Someone should inform these f***ers they're violating the same thing they're trying to get others for.
---disgruntled---
mjf
So who do they plan to sue over the GIMP? It's gonna be fun watching these people spend a hell of a lot of money dragging the entire industry to court and end up with nothing, not even their patent. I wonder if they had anyone at the DRM workshop?
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
I've just bounced off uspto.gov and read a bit of their patent. To quote their first claim
"... more frequently occurring values of digital signals are represented by shorter code lengths and the less frequently occurring values of digital signals are represented by longer code lengths..."
Tell me if I'm wrong, but is this not the Huffman coding scheme? I always thought that jpeg's compression was based on Huffman?
It is rediculious to think that Forgent Corp owns the JPEG data compression technology. Many movements and groups have contributed to improve JPEG compression. For example, the Independent JPEG Group is an independent group that writes and distributes a widely used free library for JPEG image compression. Their website features the source code and some documentation.
More information can be found on the ISO JPEG standards committee webpage.
-Tom
http://tomgould.com/
. This ambush of the digitial imaging industry will probably stand as the worst public relations nightmare a company can inflict upon itself."
Going by the patent laws.. it dosent really matter coz if this is implemented everythings going to become topsy turvy.. and mebbe there wont be much of imaging industry left... deja vu internet radio.... Seriosly it is really really disgusting, thousands of such stories come on slashdot and in the end nothing has been done about it..We are destroying ourseleves from inside.. control control patent patent.... And we thought USSR was controlled society.. Welocme to america Mr. StalinMy Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Well, I guess it's time to switch all my website's graphics to PNG.
Ugh, I wonder how this is going to affect my scanned photo collection. Anyone know how a PNG photo compares to a JPG one?
Long live PICTs!
-techwolf
I don't do this for karma, I do it for cash. It's much better.
To: Hedy Baker, hedy_baker@forgent.com
To: Alexa Coy, alexa_coy@forgent.com
Just wanted to let you know that, re: your JPEG patents and licensing, you guys are FREAKING NUTS. Perhaps when I have to pay money for the air I breathe, the light that reflects off of my retinas, along with a per-step licensing fee to whomever currently owns the IP rights for "walking," I would consider it valid to have to pay for something that is already as ubiquitous as JPEG imaging. In short, you'll get money from me when you pry it from the clutching fingers of my cold, dead corpse.
Laughing at you,
JB
You can look at the online version of the patent on the US Patent Office's website. Note that the patent process for this one was started 16 years ago in 1986 (stuff 4698672 into the Patent Number Search box on the search page to see this), which would certainly limit how much longer it could be pursued.
To me, the patent seems to largely be focussed around runlength encoding in digital video - not that this always has any real bearing on how a specific patent can suddenly become profitable. That patent itself states:
[...]It'll be interesting, and rather sad, to see if this actually get applied against JPEGs....
INVESTOR RELATIONS
News
Forgent (ticker: FORG, exchange: NASDAQ) News Release - 11-Jul-2002
Forgent Networks Clarifies Licensing Arrangement
AUSTIN, Texas, Jul 11, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Forgent(tm) Networks Inc. (Nasdaq:FORG) today clarified its licensing program regarding Forgent's JPEG data compression technology, owned by its subsidiary Compression Labs Inc., embodied in U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672.
JPEG is a standardized image compression mechanism and is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale still images.
Forgent has the sole and exclusive right to use and license all the claims under the '672 patent that implement JPEG in all "fields of use" except in the satellite broadcast business. Forgent's "fields of use" for licensing opportunities include digital cameras, digital still image devices, personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular telephones that download images, browsers, digital camcorders with a still image function, scanners and other devices used to compress, store, manipulate, print or transmit digital images.
Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent's IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue.
"We wanted to ensure the investment community and the general public are clear about the terms of our valuable JPEG data compression technology, one of the many technologies we have in our patent portfolio," stated Richard Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer at Forgent. "We are in ongoing discussions with other manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners and other products that use JPEG technology for licensing opportunities."
About Forgent
Forgent Networks provides enterprise video network software and services to improve ease-of-use, reliability and manageability of video networks. Video Network Platform (VNP) is the industry's leading video network management software that improves quality of service and cost-of-ownership for multi-vendor, multi-protocol video networks. Forgent's professional services, which have been contracted by thousands of companies, ensure the successful planning, operation and maintenance of video networks. For more information, call 866/276-FORG (3674), or visit www.forgentnetworks.com.
This release may include projections and other forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties and as such, actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected or desired. Some of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include rapid changes in technology, changes in customer order patterns or order mix, the ability to collect certain foreign receivables, foreign exchange rate fluctuations, the intensity of competition, the cost and availability of certain key components, the company's ability to manage product transitions and inventory levels, product pricing pressures, sudden or unexpected changes in demand for videoconferencing systems, litigation involving intellectual property, other issues, and the ability to consummate certain divestiture transactions. Additional discussion of these and other risk factors affecting the company's business and prospects is contained in the company's period filings with the SEC.
CONTACT: Forgent, Austin
Forgent Media Relations:
Hedy Baker, 512/437-2789
hedy_baker@forgent.com
or Forgent Investor Relations:
Alexa Coy, 512/437-2678
alexa_coy@forgent.com
:wq
I assume that the royalty must be paid whether or not terrorist information is encoded in the JPEG, right?
If this were easy, they wouldn't need us to do it!
I'm not a patent lawyer, but this sounds not entirely unlike the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm, from 1984.
From the 'compress' manpage:
"Compress uses the modified Lempel-Ziv algorithm popularized in "A Technique for High Performance Data Compression", Terry A. Welch, IEEE Computer, vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8-19. Common substrings in the file are first replaced by 9-bit codes 257 and up. When code 512 is reached, the algorithm switches to 10-bit codes and continues to use more bits until the limit specified by the -b flag is reached (default 16). Bits must be between 9 and 16. The default can be changed in the source to allow compress to be run on a smaller machine."
While the patent claims:
"1. A method for processing digital signals, where the digital signals have first values, second values and other values, to reduce the amount of data utilized to represent the digital signals and to form statistically coded signals such that the more frequently occurring values of digital signals are represented by shorter code lengths and the less frequently occurring values of digital signals are represented by longer code lengths, comprising, "
I wonder what effect this will have on Sony's Mavica Digital Cameras?
The date on the patent database is October 6, 1987. Don't patents expire in 17 years (or is it 20?)? So should this expire soon? Anyone know if they can back collect royalties?
http://www.windmeadow.com/
slashdot these goddamn fuckers!
There should be a law against this kind of predatory act. When a format for data becomes ubiquitous and presumed free for so many years without contest or complaint, rights should be surrendered by default.
This is no different than the RAMBUS situation where they encouraged people to use their IP (without disclosing they own it and will charge for its use later) and then ambushing the entire industry with it. In the case of JPEG, it has been around for so much longer than a decade that it should be public owned simply because the patents have gone so long without contest.
What are other examples of this? GIF? Also a ubiquitous format causing my headache for the industry. How long does a "patent" last anyway?
It will take a lot of action to get patent law changed and at some point, some pretty influential people need to be convinced that it needs to be changed to reflect some practical aspects of the industries we operate within. Software patents? FORGET THEM. Software should be limited to copyright since "compatibility" with other software is an important aspect of innovation in the software industry. Aged and uninforced patents? No. Just like trademarks -- if you leave them unprotected for so long, you should lose your rights to them. Trapping an entire industry in hopes of a "big score" is about as ethical as domain squatting.
That's all I have to say about that...
Does this remind anyone of rambus. Hey everybody...I know you've been making SD and DDR ram for for a while, BUT we own the technology that its based on so you owe us Royalties and Back Royalties.
"Once again something that could have been brought to my attention, YESTERDAY!!!"-Adam Sandler(The Wedding Singer)
Any lawyers reading this? I'm rather confused. What happened to the idea of estoppel by laches? To quote, "the legal doctrine that a legal right or claim will not be enforced or allowed if a long delay in asserting the right or claim has prejudiced the adverse party".
Surely waiting fifteen years before asserting a patent (and allowing infringing practices to become commonplace) is a perfect example of this?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
It doesn't seem like there'll be a problem unless these bozos can sue for back damages...
According to an article on The Register, Sony has already paid them $15 million for licensing; hopefully this won't set a bad precedent for everyone else giving in to them.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
I use GIF's and JPG's on every site I make. Sue me!
First of all, IANAL but, I am almost positive that you must try to enforce patent infringement as soon as you realize the infringement has taken place. If you fail to protect your patent, knowing that infringement has occurred, you lose your rights to the patent.
What are they going to say, "Well gee Your Honor, we didn't figure out JPEGs were infringing on our patent until 2002." Yeah, right. I don't think so.
But like I said, IANAL, so maybe I'm wrong.
So if you mod me -1 Redunant, you'll be violating their patent! :)
I wish I knew more about its history. I hope the inventors made a boatload of money from it before (and hopefully after) it became a Playtex product.
I think we've bought at least a dozen of these, two for our child (original, and wide opening) and the rest as gifts.
As if no-one before 1986 ever thought of lossy compression of signals. :-)
It'll not stand up in court.
Stick Men
Fognet sounds appropriate, given the length of that patent, it's unclear origins and it's absurdity.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The patent was awarded October 6, 1987... and as far as I know this is the first major attempt to enforce it.
My understanding is that a patent that is not actively defended could be lost (similar in some ways to a copyright) -- the company, at a minimum, should have been offering licenses deals almost 15 years ago already.
This forces companies to be active in defending their rights -- rather than allowing others (competitors) to unknowingly infringe for years and then get ambushed years later with a "convenient and fair license deal".
It is not considered good faith to let a patent lapse and attempt to enforce it years later (consider BT recent attempt at licensing hyperlinks) -- this usually angers the judges and the "infringement" cases are thrown out or "settled" quietly out of the public eye.
They're obviously terrorists, just look at their wall street performance *right* after 9/11: (NasdaqNM:FORG)
(* I don't think I can afford to have a lien on my porn collection. *)
Send it all back to Forgent. Email a few to each employee.
(begin letter)
Dear Forgent Employee,
Attached is some of my porn collection. I am returning it to your company because I inadvertantly used your patented JPEG format.
The rest is still to follow. My printer is slow. Playmate Debby especially requires a lot of ink because of her unorthodox techniques and tools, as you can clearly see in image #4057.
Thank You for your patience and understanding,
[Slashdot User]"
(end letter)
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, but read the patent description. They didn't patent lossy compression.... they patented the idea that your algorithm should figure out on the fly the best way to compress. That's basically the discrete version of wavelet's.
decided to do this with the patents they hold on SQL?
Government is the abdication of your responsibility to a faceless bureaucracy. Anarchy(absence of government)is the a
Not trying to be facetious or anything, but a serious question:
/. land know what you have to do to *change* the terms and pricing of patent licenses? For example, what kinds of papers have to be filed, who has to be notified and how much notice must be given, etc.
Does anyone out there in
I seem to recall reading somewhere that patents have to be defended (vigorously?) to be upheld and anyone who let their IP languish for ten years in full public view while it becomes a standard hasn't defended anything, rendering their patent claim invalid.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
On a related note, I believe that the LZW compression patent expires on 20 June 2003. Some quick Google research indicates that while JPEG only goes back to 1991 as a standard, the methods used date back to at least June 1987.
So even if there do turn out to be some legitimate patents, they only have a few years to pester us.
This very similar to what happened with the gif format.
This will be known as the Day that Science Died.
From the jpeg homepage:e .htm
http://www.jpeg.org/public/jpeghomepag
It mentions that the jpeg standard was a colaboration between a group of compainies and ppl. Nothing mentioned about a patent by this company. So are these people claiming to have invented the jpeg before these people standardized it?
Notice, nowhere does it say anything (at least not that I read) about attempting to liscence consumers. Or collect said royalty from consumers.
Merely the companies that make the devices.
This could have two potential negative impacts: 1 drive up the prices, or two, drive the development of new processes for getting better compression that looks better. (Lets face it, Jpgs are pretty crappy.. there are better alternatives out there, just not in as widespread use).
maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Hmmm... Good points, although I don't entirely agree with the lawsuit against McDonalds. IMHO, the worst thing that has ever happened to this world in general and America in particular is the infestation of a strange and bizarre creature we call "lawyers." Regardless of the lawsuit, the only people who ever make out on top are going to be the leeche... err ... lawyers. It doesn't matter if you're complaining about someone using your "neato" idea or burning your private parts with blisteringly hot coffee.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I think the Ivy League Uni's would do the world a favor if they quit churning out lawyers like Microsoft does hotfixes. And I'm not going to even TOUCH what I think about the software patents -- while it does protect your IP, if it's something obscure (i.e., generically definied) and/or well known or used, like JPEGS, you're either going to hurt your own reputation as a company or are going to negatively impact those of us who are actually trying to do something good for the community...
I think this was a little incoherent =D
He who has no
Are there patents for this in other countries? International patents or JUST the US?
IF not, which countries are they NOT patented in?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Patents do have an expiration, and when submitting patents, you have to detailed information about what you're wanting to patent. Designs, forumlas, etc.. that would be terribly useful in reproducing the item in question.
After it's submitted for patenting, it becomes Patent Pending. From that point, you're protected by law as if it were patented. However, while it's pending, the Patent Office has to see if it can find something similar or that pre-dates this request for patent. If they do, then you're rejected. If they don't, then your patent gets approved, and the clock starts ticking towards your expiration date.
IMHO: The patent office should reject the patent, as this is simply a different spin on other forms of image compression. (However, I'm sure they have all sorts of rules about what constitutes something different for a similar-but-not-the-same patent.)
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
How can anbody own a compression algorithm. Its like saying that you own the quadratic equation. You can not own mathematical formulas or arguments and algorithms are just that. You can discover them, but you cant own them. Only a society obsessed with the all mighty dollar would even allow such nonsense to stand.
The press release has many GIF images on it. I wonder if they paid UniSys any royalties?
My future's determined by Thieves, thugs, and vermin -- The Offspring
That's the only creation date I can find for the JPEG standard (ISO/IEC 10918-1:1994)
.
That, unfortunately, puts this patent way before the JPEG standard. I hope there's prior art. .
why do you think sony paid a paltry sum of 15M for licencing? probably because they got a really good deal from forgent like exclusive rights to it while forgent gets a good base for claims...
i like PNG more and more every day :)
If they actually can enforce this patent, we may suddenly start seeing people dropping JPEG support in exchange for PNG.
The easiest way for a replacement of a popular product to get accepted in the marketplace is if they 1) start charging for said popular product, or 2) stop supporting said product.
I personally don't think anything's going to come from this, but if it does, no big loss.
Wasn't the reason for JPEG (MPEG) etc to be a STANDARD?
Surely enforcing fee's makes it NON-STANDARD.
Have's and have not's.
STANDARDS are suppost to be AVAILABLE for use, not restricted by fee's or other obstacles.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Conflicted: the feeling you get thinking about a scummy company using a bad patent to rid the world of goatse.cx.....
www.eFax.com are spammers
http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~brislawn/JPEG.0003/tsld002 .htm
A brief history of JPEG, which started in 1985. I think it can be fought on the premise that the patent was based on the work of the consortium, and not the work of the person who filed the patent. First to invent, not first to file.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
...someone comes out with a public-domain, cross platform library that supports all of the format options (ala, LibJPEG). there's nothing really good out there now - yes, i've seen Jasper.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
The GIF fiasco did lead people to create (and even support PNG), but honestly, GIF is still used way more, just because ALL the graphics designers out there know about it, and everything supports its creation and display.
I believe the same thing will happen with this JPEG patent. JPEG2K will become a fully functional spec, but the original JPEG will still rule (except in things like the GTK)
CMBurns
Free online gaming
"See my vest, made from real gorrilla chest!"
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Patent terms are 20 years from filing date. They filed this in October 86, which gives them about 2.5 years.
I imagine they can sue for back royalties. Anyone know if that right expires along with the patent?
Thought this might be the last gasp of a distressed company, but Forgent Networks (NASDAQ:FORG) isn't doing too bad stock wise, for the year it's up 250%, down 12% for the month and up 12% for the week, currently 4.385; 52 week high 5.67, low 0.80.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
...down the road for accessing archived, digitized audio and video.
(Slashdot link about accessing today's data formats in 25 years here)
Example: Company X enforces a patent claim on their 'SD2KCF super-duper 2000 compression format' and the royalty fees are seen as exorbitant. Result? people shy away from using Company X's way of doing things: it costs too much.
A few years from now, files encoded in 'SD2KCF' format may well be unreadable because no one uses that scheme anymore.
Yes, technology improves over time... but this is an example of short-sighted thinking, at best.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
20 years from filing date. That gives them 2.5 years of royalties.
They can, however, sue for back royalties, but there may be some limit on how far back they can go.
- The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in video compression systems. It focuses on intra-frame compression technologies, incl motion detection and compensation, etc.
- This patent seems to only cover lossless transmission. (Removing redundant data, not removing information.)
- It uses Huffman-coding after performing statistical analysis, run-length encoding, etc, but not details on cosine transforms, which JPEG uses.
It appears that other patents they reference describe existing systems which use cosine transforms with lossy compression...Don't patents have a lifetime of 17 years? I may be wrong on that number. But if is 17 years then that means that it expires in 2003. Maybe they figure that they can milk the royalties for the last year they have the patent.
I didn't see jpeg mentionned here. I reminds me of my previous employer who got a patent on PWM and thought that it wouldn't get challenged. The way he phrased it appeared not to be PWM but when he annoyed some big guys he found out that his patent wasn't worth shit.
= PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='4,698,672'.WKU.&OS=PN/4,698,672& RS=PN/4,698,672
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1
I'm gonna broadcast all my JPEG's :)
It seems to me after actually trying to read the patent, with all it's fluff about inter-frame changes that this would only cover JPEG used in the context of compressing video, not a single frame.
Anyone else for storming the USPTO, I think with a few thousand angry tech ppl at their door they might change their stupid policies, or at the least we can disrupt them enuff to delay other more recent and stupid patents...
PNG is a lossless compression while JPG is a lossy compression.
And that's why Gimp has a compression slider for PNG files, right?
Trouble is, there is no PNG-like alternate that's widely accepted, not yet.
You mean, something like PNG? It works in every browser I've tried it in (including the horribly antiquated, why-do-fuckers-still-use-this Netscape 4.7x).
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
- Lawyer's call it "The Last Sport of Kings". Why? Because it takes from between 2 to 4 million dollars, US, to effectively defend or litigate a patent infringement suit.
- Because of the high cost of defense or litigation, patent holders use this cost as a weapon to force capitulation by firms that don't want the costs of defending themselves, regardless of merit.
- Because of the above, patent holders will typically target small companies first, extort licensing fees, and then use those fees to progressively fund attacks against other potential violators.
- Once a patent is out, it is presumed that everyone knows about it. That means if you infringe the patent, you are open to damages for the time that you infringed the patent. The exception is that if the litigator bought the patent, they only get to sue from the time that they owned it.
So, what does that mean? You can bet that if they owned the patent the entire time, they very deliberately let widespread adoption of Jpeg's go forward, knowing that they could afterwards sue and probably settle with a number of graphics products producers, since even if the producers stop using their patented products, they were in violation of the patent for a long period of time.Oh, and yes, IANAL.
First, their patent is dated 26 October, 1986. IANAL, but I beleive that patents are only valid for 17 years, so even if it were effective, it would only last for another year or so. Also, in order for a patent to remain valid, the holder must continually defend it. You must file claims, or at least C&D letters within a reasonable time of becoming knowledgeable of an infringement. The entire industry adopting a technology as a standard for over ten years under the assumption that it is free (beer and freedom), is a strong indication that they have failed in that regard. They can't simply wait for a technology to become pervasive and then whack everyone that uses it. As soon as this patent goes to court, it will be stricken down.
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
Its funny how this place will never post either an article that is either negative toward linux, or is positive about windows (or MS in general).
.net on *nix article, and MS still ended up getting raped by all the harpies towing the Linux Party line.
About the only thing I have seen that drew close to the opinion glass ceiling was the
It amazes me how tightly so many technical people are willing to fight a holy war. I guess just because someone can program code doesnt make their opinion logical, or any less prone to evangelism.
In other news, God has announced that he owns the earth, in fact he goes as far as to claim ownage of the whole universe. So in addition to worshipping him day and night, we're also required to pay him a licensing fee.
Hmm.. all these corporations.. taking over my wants and desires... advertising in live TV.. ISPs preventing me from enjoying my bandwith.. IP lawyers sueing every enterprising company to steal money from the system which could make my life better. My god.. I'm gonna pack up my old laptop.. move to the country.. and stay in a nice log cabit.. away from TV.. away from ISPs.. away from the WORLD.. muwahahaaha....
Life is like a roller-coaster.. just remember to get off once in a while.
Courts won't enforce such a patent because JPEG is an industry standard and I'm sure these people did not disclose their patent during the standards setting process. No to mention the JPEG standard makes no reference to any such patent.
They've owned this patent for years, they didn't just suddenly announce that it's theirs and they're going to start licensing it. There has been a license in existance for years. They didn't even CHANGE the license. This won't impact any of us in the least. You people are tribal sycophants.
Read more about my delusions at:
My White House Diaries
Thank you for a single term presidency,
W
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how you can patent something already in the public domain.
And with how long JPEG has been around, you would think they would have raised the point earlier of the unliscensed distribution of their technology. That is, of course, unless the whole point was wait until everybody uses it and then enforce the patent.
If you want to enforce a patent, you need to enforce it from the beginning. Also, anything that is a standard needs to be released to the public domain.
This is obviously a scam. It would be interesting to see how it plays out.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
expand the ogg project. add to the video and audio codecs that are in development.
In my world, I thought you had to protect your IP in a reasonable time. If your ideas were released into the public domain and you didn't fight to regain control (I.E. DeCSS) then your IP wasn't worth a damn.
If your IP has been running around in the public domain for oodles of years, then it seems that you couldn't fight to put the genie back in the bottle....
Wouldn't this type of argument apply here?
You are thinking of trademark law. The best example is Kleenex. Kleenex made no attempt to protect their trademark and it has become so prolific in society that it has come to mean disposable tissue in the generic sense.
The best example is "aspirin", which was a trademark of the Bayer corporation. They lost it, and now the term is generic.
Kleenex (and Xerox) are still trademarks under the control of their owners.
Ah, but they are going after the home user in a fasion. All this patent BS that these large companies are going through means they'll have shell out money and, in some way, it'll be passed down to the consumer, probably in the form of a few dollars price increase. No, sending a bill directly to the home user isn't going to accomplish much. They're going to laugh and say "yeah, right!" But remeber how the recording industry gets a piece of the action for every CDR/CDRW and MD sold? Damn well betcha the consumer is paying for it. Not that I think they'll be able to enforce it after all these years. What do you want to bet that if they had charged for it's use back in the day, we wouldn't be using .jpg now? Kinda underhanded, personally.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Someone quick patent breathing. I am sure you could make a patent broad enough to cover it somehow. Then enforce it for the president of Forgent. Say $5 / breath should be sufficient. Of course that would mean there would have to be some sort of regulatory committee that would monitor his breathing. I smell money.
Check out the FORG financial data. You'll see that their market cap is over $100 million, and it will go up if the manage to force royalty payments from the patent. I don't see any way that it would work out to be cheaper to buy the company than to pay the royalties.
shouldn't this be considered an act of econo-terrorism or something? Some two-bit company that nobody's ever heard of suddenly recalls they have the patent on a compression scheme (never mind the old argument about patenting mathematical algorithms) and now that it's entrenched, everyone is supposed to just smile and nod and hand over their checkbooks???
What kind of trained chimps work at the patent office these days? The way they're handing out patents for anything that sounds good, I'm sure I can come up with a patent for flatulance and make Bill Gates look like a begger on the street.
How about a patent for the process of registering one's unique implementation of a process, method or physical device for the purpose of proving original creativity and control?
Gif was hardly caught early in its life, as some seem to think.
:p
Furthermore, gif != jpeg != png.
Gifs suck ass for some things, that's why jpegs are used. (Think porn.) Other things, jpegs suck for, and gifs are used. Now that gifs are evil, png is often used in place of gif.
However, if we used png in place of jpeg, it'd suck the arse of CowboyNeal. (No offense to CBN.)
Anyway, I think the biggest reason for the idiocy about 'gif' being 'caught early' is the fact that gif suxors for porn, so jpeg was used, and we all know what the average Slashdotter has a lot of.
Thus, they only saw jpegs instead of gifs, and well, the current confusion.
hedy_baker@forgent.com
alexa_coy@forgent.com
Company Officers
Richard_Snyder@forgent.comc omt .comt .com
Jay_Peterson@forgent.
Ken_Kalinoski@forgent.com
Dennis_Egan@forgen
Bob_Seidel@forgent.com
Nancy_Harris@forgen
PNG is only superior depending upon how it is implemented, and Internet Eplorer STILL does not render transparent PNGs properly. Which really sucks considering the really cool things you could do with alpha transparency on a webpage. Guess MS was too busy innovating with that stupid image bar that pops up over images. Most people have never even heard of PNG.
What will likely happen is that Microsoft will look around and come up with a patent that they own that Forent or Compression labs is violating and they will come up with a cross-license agreement.
This is the big reason the patent system is screwed. The little guy, and that may well include Forent in this case, has no leverage against the big guys.
A method or apparatus whereby 2 values are composited together to make a third value. This would include storing the third value in one of the original 2 values that made the original composite.
Due to the nature of this action it would also cover the deduction of one value from another and other such items as those having their basis in this method of data transformation and it's inverse
Some standards groups knowingly consider patented technology for otherwise open standards, but wasn't there a standards group a few months ago (I forgot which one, and I can't find a link) where some company pushed patented technology without telling the standards committe? If I recall correctly, the perpetrators got smacked a bit for that one... and that's probably what will happen in this case. (someone find that story for me).
now MS should buy this company and kill Java (which uses jpeg). ofcourse, they can kill netscape too. If they follow their current strategy of free license to everyone except GPL style license, then linux would be dead (because kde, gnome would be gone).
I always said lynx was that wave of the future... but did anyone beleave me? nooooo! showed you all up now! *goes and plays on his old 486/33 without 'x' installed*
Bush and Cheney are christians who bombed WTC.
As per their campaign promise. It is widely considered the issue that won them the election.
Doesn't JPEG stand for Joint Photographic Experts Group ? Isn't this the group that came up with the JPEG format in the first place?
According to JPEG what most of us believe to be JPEG files are actually JFIF which are royalty free thanks to C-Cube Microsystems. So Forgent Might not be due that much in royalties after all.
This might be a good thing after all. The restrictions on GIFs spawned a much better file format (PNG). This could do the same for Lossy Images.
i could not think of anything clever.
The referred-to patent is owned by "Compression Labs," which is referred to as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Forgent. Evidently they are (or perhaps were) a San Jose-based company which did indeed do video compression technology; through Google I found a press release from them in 1991 announcing video phone products with AT&T and again in 1993 from AT&T's Paradyne unit. Back then their technology was called "CDV" (compressed digital video) and was, interestingly, described as "based on the MPEG standard." A web page at Cisco referrs to a Compression Labs standard as "proprietary" and distinct from JPEG.
It's worth noting that in their last reported quarter, Forgent made $15M from a "licensing program based on its still-image compression technology." This is coming to light now, I suspect, because two companies have already caved in and paid for use of the technology, the announced one being Sony, and this gives Forgent legitimacy to bully others with this stick.
As for mass revolt against the JPEG format, the GIF controversy came to light in 1994. Eight years later and it's still the most widely-used graphics format that provides consistently-supported (if mediocre) implementations for transparency and simple animation. The majority of web browsers in the wild still don't support PNG correctly (and virtually nothing supports MNG).
Then the patent is no good to begin with.
I shouldn't need to check to see if sliding
a spoon across a smooth table to someone sitting
on the other side is already claimed, should I?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Anyone know what GNU is going to do? I recall reading a section on their site on why they only use jpegs instead of gifs. In fact I think all the logos are only available in jpeg
The patent dates back to 1986, before everybody and their dog was going around patenting every half-baked idea that fell out of someone's ass, so it's quite likely that the patent is legitimate (or at least as legitimate as these things get). The problem is that they've sat on this patent, not requiring licensing or enforcing it for the past 15+ years and only now, when every company on the planet that makes something electronic is using JPEG as their compression scheme do they decide to enforce it.
IANAL but I know that in order to be able to license copyrights and trademarks for a fee, owners are required to pursue infringement when it happens, otherwise they basically lose the right to the trademark/copyright. Is there a similar provision for patents? It's not like some bizarre little no-name company is the only one to have been using JPEG compression for the last 16 years...it's been all over the place. Shouldn't they have had to enforce this patent sooner in order to be able to license it now?
That said, this company (Forgent? Who the fuck are they?) is basically going up against Sony, Kodak, Adobe, Microsoft, etc. Are they really so stupid to think that these guys are going to just spread their cheeks for them without a fight? I don't think so.
E
ps...I just noticed this link over at El Reg that mentions that Sony already ponied up. Wussies.
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
It appeared to me that the company is
probably one of those patent stockpiling
schemes. They don't make money on their
good name and what they can produce--
rather on how tough/slimy/sneaky they
can be in using the law to extort others.
There is no reason to be concerned at all, i prefer not to use jpegs or gifs, instead i have opted to use exclusivly PNG for their better compresion, and not to mention they look at heck of alot better too.
BTW, good luck enforcing that licensing, ROFL!!
_______
Death wish, n.:
The only wish that always comes true, whether or not one wishes it t
No, but you should have to check prior patents if you ever develop anything with any industrial utility and you plan to market it. Spending money on development and marketing, and exposing yourself to liability, without determining your exposure up front is foolhardy. It's called due diligence. It's your burden, and it's a good idea.
The patent was issued on October 6, 1987.
As I recall, patents are good for 17 years.
That means this thing will pop in 2004.
They will, at best, succeed in shaking down
a couple of big companies before everyone
is free to ignore them. So, go back to work.
Direct from the patent: "The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in video compression systems."
Therefore, the patent should not apply to any still image compression like Forgent seems to claim. It does seem that they may be able to stake some claims to MotionJPEGs, which could cause some problems for makers of digital video cameras, but from what I've read of the patent, most of Forgent's claims wouldn't hold up in court.
they were stoned
CONTACT:
Forgent, Austin
Forgent Media Relations:
Hedy Baker, 512/437-2789
hedy_baker@forgent.com
or
Forgent Investor Relations:
Alexa Coy, 512/437-2678
alexa_coy@forgent.com
Well let's not get too excited about all this. Chances are they will never be able to put their foot down, and if they do, oh well, consider it a good intention to build a new and better image compression technology (although JPEG 2000 looks rather promising).
Bzzzzt... Wrong!
They just weren't allowed to sell during the quiet period. Which is an absolutely normal corporate practice and generally considered "A good thing."
What annoyed the SEC is that there was an appearance that some corporate execs were allowed to sell off their holdings during this period.
If these people have a patent on DCT and huffman coding (which isn't likely to be valid if tested in court, but that's another matter), let's all just adopt JPEG 2000 as soon as possible. Wavelet coding is superior, anyway.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Here:
http://djvu.sourceforge.net
IANAL, but...
This whole thing seems familiar, not just with GIF but with Rambus and the SDRAM/DDR standards.
At the time, one of the writings mentioned a thing called "Equitable Estoppel." My interpretation was that if you had a patent that was becoming an industry standard, you had to begin notification "promptly," and to allow it to become a standard and *then* begin notifying/litigating was legally naughty.
Rambus is still around, though a shadow of their former arrogance. (I understand that the people are still just as arrogant as ever, they just don't get the press.) In some ways, notably submarining and patent-stretching Rambus was worse. But at least once they had stretched their original art to look like it covered SDRAM and got it issued, they were prompt in filing suit.
It looks like this company deserves no less.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Ha! These boobs are just amateurs. I on the other hand have purchased the patent rights to toilet paper. I'm gonna make a sh*tload of money!
Yet again something that will be tossed out under the Doctrine of Laches:
m .n sf/articles/5731FF9F4372B6ED85256B43006EA07D?OpenD ocument
/**/
"Laches is recognized as an equitable defense available to defendants in patent infringement litigation under 35 U.S.C. Section 282 (1988). Laches enables the infringer to avoid liability if the patent holder delays too long before commencing litigation. The doctrine flows from the longstanding, fundamental legal principle that equity will not protect those who sleep on their rights."
Reference: The Doctrine of Laches and Patent Infringement Litigation at URL:
http://tinyurl.com/pzt
Original URL before tinyurling:
http://www.converium.com/web/converium/converiu
Crow
I'm not a mathematician, so forgive my ignorance, but aren't the wavelets we're discussing here some sort of math? By which I mean some kind of equation, or maybe you'd say a function in n variables, but in the end it is solvable for a real number, yes?
If so, how do you patent math? Or is the patent on a software program that does this math operation?
IANAL, etc., but I thought that patents must be defended from the outset or else the patenter loses the right to claim infringement. Any legal types have the letter of the law on this issue?
This patent can have a major affect on web browsers. Microsoft can easily purchase a blanket license to use JPEG compression in all their products including IE but their would be no comparable organization that can do the same for Mozilla. Furthermore if the use of JPGs is covered by a patent you could not include a browser that uses this technology in any GPL only distribution. It would impact numerous other programs. A free replacement for the JPEG format would be needed.
True only of trademarks.
Contrary to popular belief, copyrights, trademarks, and patents simply do not work the same.
DNA just wants to be free...
This'll never make it and Forgent is setting out on a potentially very embarassing road.
/.ers should know well as it comes up about every other day because of a lame patent somewhere.
It is irrelevant who owns the patent (and I thought JPEG was a standards committee that owned the patent) on the JPEG compression method. The method itself is so widely used in so many devices it seems unenforcable.
By not enforcing their patent initially, they gave up the right to do so. This is an argument
Patents are granted monopolies and if you don't defend your grant, you make it very difficult to do so in the future.
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
following through on some other guys signature:
cd ~/documents/work/boringstuff/.porn/
wget -nc -r -l 5 www.autopr0n.com
rm `find -type f -not -name "*.jpg" -not -name "*.JPG"`
Read their page and you'll know:
"Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent's IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue."
Hmmm, notice that the law firm is not named. Maybe anonymity is in its contract with Forgent. Just in case you feel compelled to comment to Forgent, here's the contact info on their page:
Forgent Media Relations:
Hedy Baker, 512/437-2789
hedy_baker@forgent.com
The difference is that in your example, the Enron employees would be compensated (if late) to the extent that value could be derived from the remaining assets of the corporation for illegal acts which injured them, while slave reparations would be paid to people who were not injured by companies which committed legal acts, or even just bought companies many years after they committed illegal acts.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
...which would be something else if Unisys hadn't had the good sense to drop the whole "we're going to charge everyone to use .GIF" idea.
Virg
It's not a misleading example at all. When you order a hot drink like Coffee or Tea, you should be prepared to cope with it being any temperature up to 212 degrees farenheit. Tea should be made with boiling water, not boiled water.
Hell, I was able to deal with hot drinks by the time I was five years old, and I have absolutely no sympathy for Liebeck.
If I were on her jury, I'd have looked right at her and said "coffee's SUPPOSED to be hot, lady. Go cope."
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
CompuServe tried to do this with .GIF. We all know what happened with that.
-R
Anyone have more information on this?
Bleh!
I realize, with a name like "IP, Daily", that you are, probably, an otherwise respected member of the slashdot community who has assumed an alternate name to preserve your reputation while you take it upon yourself to play devil's advocate on this very touchy subject.
In the interest of expanding the debate on this subject I must admit I firmly disagree with your posts. My objection rests on a simple observation; many of the "joke" patent claims we see listed on slashdot appear to be originally based on completely different technologies or they never should have been awarded in the first place due to prior art or the nebulous concept of "obviousness".
If the Patent Office is unable to do "due diligence" then how is the rest of the marketplace supposed to accomplish this?
Or, one the other hand, do you think everyone who ever used a hyperlink should have done the due diligence to determine that BT may have owned the patent on that "technology"?
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Last time I checked Photoshop was 600 dollars. Adobe is making a killing and using a technology developed by others for free! I say Forgent should use a discriminatory licensing policy. Charge the big boys like hell and let all free software use the technology without restriction.
So buy their stock (NASDAQ:FORG) today. Then, sell it after the herd has stampeded it up 400%. Then, sell short because this type of thing happens all the time, and the companies claiming the patent on such a broadly used technology always fall back to their pre-lawsuit levels, often below.
I am not qualified to give investment advice. Ignore the above statement. Or don't, at your peril.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
I used to work there! Compression Labs (CLI) made equipment for digital video compression. They were the company behind the short-lived AT&T "videophone" that appeared in the early 1990's. Their main bread and butter was video conferencing systems for businesses and hotels. They were dedicated boxes on wheels, complete with TV and camera and computer, that looked like those old TV carts you see in schools. The idea was that you rolled them to whatever meeting room your company used, then hooked up to a T1 or ISDN line for the videoconference. They also made some other units, such as standalone systems for permanent installation, but the wheeled systems were the most popular.
Unfortunately as the generic PC became faster and better at handling video, there became less and less of a need for dedicated video compression hardware. The company started losing sales and going downhill. Compression Labs did have an industry niche, a very easy to use system that was completely turnkey, but as with so many things, low cost won out in the end.
VTEL, a competitor, bought Compression Labs. VTEL made similar videoconferencing machines, but they were integrated with a PC. They were harder to use, but had PC niceties such as the ability to share PC files and access over the videoconference. Unfortunately they weren't selling very well either.
I left the company around the time CLI was bought out by VTEL. It seems they've renamed themselves to Forgent, and set up a business model of providing services instead of selling boxes. Probably a smart move. It is a dumb move to enforce this patent, though!
While CLI had a lot of good patents, they applied mostly to video and the way it was compressed before transmission and restored after reception. They used the H.* standards for digital video transmission, but there is a lot of leeway in how you process the video signal at both ends to make the most use of the bandwidth, and this is where CLI's patents came in.
I don't believe this patent could apply to still images such as JPEG. Reading the patent, I see it mentions successive video frames quite often. Maybe there are some parts that deal with JPEG-like encoding methods, but IANAL. Honestly, I don't believe this patent can be valid, especially after the company submarined for so long and is only now claiming enforcement. They were a company I was once proud to be a part of, and it makes me sad to see them stooping to this level.
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
I hope he does a reprise of the Monkey Dance first.
Just for the record:
If your firm pursues the threatened licensing on JPEG at this late date, I'll be forced to regard your firm as another of the those of lax ethicial standards uncovered in recent months. If you had intended to charge for JPEG usage you should have made that clear from the first; to pursue this approach very much appears to be a "bait and switch" tactic unworthy of an honest firm.
As such, pusuit of JPEG licensing at this point will result in efforts on my part to ensure that no Forgent Networks products are used in any system or business unit I have influence with. I can not in good faith expose my firm to to the risks policies like yours bring to the table.
Once upon a time (circa 1986) a firm known as SEA had a patent on a software compression technology that dominated the market. Businesses paid large amounts of money to use SEA's ARC, and private individuals used a freeware package known as pkarc to read and create their own archives. SEA decided that the "free" usage was costing them money and started threatening to sue people using the free product for non-commerical use. I was a BBS operator in that era.. within a month the now famous "zip" compression format was created and released. Within 6 months ARC compression was virtually extinct in commerce and popular use; today only us oldtimers know that it even existed.
Those who do not know history are doomed to recreate it. You are now warned... there is always another company and product that can take your place. All your firm can gain from this unethical bait and switch is bad publicity and the loss of value.
Confined though we are, infinity dwells within.
Prrior art claim 1
Prrior art claim 2
For example, if Forgent Networks can show that they had very good reasons not to bring this earlier, they may well be able to defend this patent. On the other hand, given the widespread use of .jpeg technology and presuming their patent obviously covers all the widespread uses, the fact that they've waited far past the 6 years mentioned in that article might show presumption of laches.
As others have mentioned, this patent seems more oriented towards video and many of the current formats have not been in wide use for the above mentioned 6 years. Digital video seems to be a minefield of patents...
Bleh!
I'm glad they didn't do something like this with DivX... or we all would be in trouble ;)
Nuggz, you deserve karma just for your choice of title.
Virg
I've said this before and I'll say it again: Intellectual Property is an oxymoron. Trying to control the use of something as nebulous as an idea is an exercise in futility.
So, yeah, you can patent math, just like you can now patent genes that occur naturally. It's a wacky world we live in.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If websites can't use JPEG anymore, what the hell are they going to convert them to? Most other formats are more than double the size of a JPEG picture...
If the answer is "more lawyers" then the question shouldn't have been asked.
Seriously, though.
Your contention is that SONY, Apple, Microsoft, Nikon, Canon, HP, IBM, AOL, Xerox, and every other company that engages in the fields that "include digital cameras, digital still image devices, personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular telephones that download images, browsers, digital camcorders with a still image function, scanners and other devices used to compress, store, manipulate, print or transmit digital images" either failed to hire a Search Firm or did hire a Search Firm and then willfully ignored this patent?
Of course not. The file format was released as an open standard and Forgent is now attempting to cash in on a vaguely related patent.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
So yeah we have some monstrous-sounding patents but that's the way the system has evolved. Ridiculous, sure, but it doesn't mean it's enforceable as stated.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
But, that will not save them from having to deal with all of the revenue generated by previous versions of those products over the years. That could potentially be a boatload of cash that these companies will have to fork over because of Forgent's decision to enforce their patent.
Two things could stand in the way of Forgent and the truckloads of cash they are dreaming of:
The gap between the time the patent was granted and the time of enforcement. We are talking about over a decade of time that Forgent, for all practical purposes, chose not to enforce their patent on JPEG encoding. There is a concept of tacit approval that companies such as Adobe could call into play when this goes to court. And since Forgent has stated on their web site that a "national law firm" is involved, you can bet this will go to court... soon.
Extending the concept of tacit approval, the defendants could claim they would not have used the patented technology in their products if they had known the patent would be enforced. The fact that it was not enforced, during a reasonable period of time after the patent was granted, makes this argument a solid one.
Forgent better hope that the national law firm they hired can claim a plausible reason why it took them so long to enforce this patent. If not, then it will likely be thrown out for all products using the JPEG format up until the date that Forgent decided to enforce it. If that happens, then the flow of money from this will be reduced to a trickle of what it could have been.
JPG was popular way back when I was running a dialup BBS. There were lots of utils like GIF2JPG.EXE and JPG2GIF.EXE and big debates on the message boards about which was better. I know I was still running a dialup board in '94 so JPG has been popular for well over 8 years from my standpoint. Its definately past the 6 in which you have to make the claim of infringment.
Oh, Im sure I can dig up a backup of those GIF2JPG.EXE utils which would probably have a date they were made in them too.
Morphing Software
This patent was issued on October 6, 1987 and expires on October 6, 2004. In a little over two years, there will be no more patent encumbrance. Yes, it is stupid that the owner waited this long to put firms on notice.
lol, morons. Doubtful they have a license to have .gif files on their website.
this was the part that caught my attention the most:
:)
"Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Statements in this press release regarding Forgent's business which are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" that involve risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report or Form 10-K for the most recently ended fiscal year.
Risks and uncertainties.........no shit!!!!
This issue isn't unique to modern times or the computer industry. A patent lawyer named George Selden used a vague patent to force people who built cars in the 1800's to pay a licensing fee. It wasn't until Henry Ford challenged that patent in 1903 that the auto industry took off.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
use and spread software based on free (as in speech) standards. like openoffice.org, mozilla, etc. burn CDs and give them out to people and tell them to copy and give out CDs. (yes, im doing this)
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/#history (By the way, despite the implications in some of CompuServe's old press releases and in occasional trade-press articles, PNG's development was not instigated by either CompuServe or the World Wide Web Consortium, nor was it led by them. Individuals from both organizations contributed to the effort, but the PNG development group exists as a separate, Internet-based entity.)
These bastards paid for a government regulation that restricts my use of my own property. Where's my compensation under the 5th Amendment takings clause for all of these thousands of regulations that restrict how I can use my own property?
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Part 1:
1. A method for processing digital signals, where the digital signals have first values, second values and other values, to reduce the amount of data utilized to represent the digital signals and to form statistically coded signals such that the more frequently occurring values of digital signals are represented by shorter code lengths and the less frequently occurring values of digital signals are represented by longer code lengths, comprising,
forming first runlength code values representing the number of consecutive first values of said digital signals followed by said second value,
forming second runlength code values representing the number of consecutive first values of said digital signals followed by one of said other values.
---
6. A method for processing input signals to reduce the amount of data utilized to represent the input signals, the steps comprising,
processing the input signals to form processed signals where the processed signals are digital numbers having first values, second values, and other values,
coding each digital number to form statistically coded signals such that the more frequently occurring values in the digital numbers are represented by shorter code lengths and the less frequently occurring values of coded signals are represented by longer code lengths, said coding including,
forming first runlength code values representing the number of consecutive first values followed by said second value in a digital number,
forming second runlength code values representing the number of consecutive first values followed by one of said other values in the digital number.
---
Fourier Transform and Run-Length encoding. They patented an idea, and they don't even give a method. The fact that the method involved was one of the most widely used mathematical tools seemed to have slipped by the PTO.
I am a science fantasy fan
The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for processing signals to remove redundant information thereby making the signals more suitable for transfer through a limited-bandwidth medium.
By definition, all mediums are bandwidth-limited. Therefore, isn't there own language restricting their patent to a distinct usage that is essentially meaningless?
IANAL, so feel free to make fun of my lack of legal knowledge.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
In order to comply with the patent, everybody can return their pr0n collections to:
Forgent, Austin
Forgent Media Relations:
Hedy Baker, 512/437-2789
hedy_baker@forgent.com
or
Forgent Investor Relations:
Alexa Coy, 512/437-2678
alexa_coy@forgent.com
The DivX Team had decided to do this...
;)
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd be in trouble
I'm sitting in the JPEG2000 committee meeting in Boston right now, and beleive me, they are ensuring that, same as the intent at the start of the process, JPEG2000 does not have any patents being applied against the protocol for profit!
Really. There isn't going to be a JPEG2000 with licencing issues.
Breakfast served all day!
First off, IANAL (The typical slashdot disclaimer) and I'm assuming that the patent posters have provided links to is the right one.
Patents have to apply to very specific things, and they have to spell out every fricking little detail. That's why the claims read like legaleeze.
If you keep reading though, you'll see that their patent applies to processing video signals. It could cover movies or TV shows, but there is no way you could translate that into still images.
Most of the patent is talking about how to compare differences in frames and then determining the best method to send the next frame. (ie. send the new frame vs sending what's changed in the frame.)
I don't have time to look at the other patent referenced in that they also claim to own. However, it looks like it could apply to jpegs from the way it was referenced.
"Tax preparation software eliminates errors your[SIC] may make...." From IRS home page.
Alexa,
Let me get this straight, you think holding the ENTIRE internet hostage for licensing fees for jpeg is good public relations? I suspect you have just sunk you company into a vast morass of script-kiddie harrassment, insanse legal tangles, and inumerable denial of service attacks, in my opinion. Frankly, I doubt that you even have good legal ground to stand onm considering the fact that jpeg has been around the world wide web for over seven years. Your company's management is obviously on the same mental level as a bi-valve.
Sincerely,
blah...
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Claim 5: The method of claim 1 wherein said first values have the highest frequency of occurrence in said digital signals, wherein said second values have the next highest frequency of occurrence in said digital signals, and wherein said other values have the lowest frequency of occurrence in said digital signals.
The argument is that this claim covers spectral partitioning techniques, which are the basic ideas behind the DCT as used in Jpg, and the decomosition in wavelet partitionings. The basic idea used is to separate out the high frequency and low frequency components, and you encode the relivant components first.
Thus you can EASILY argue that this patent claim covers jpg (DCT) and wavelet based compression algorithms. It doesn't matter HOW the image is decomposed into spectral components, be it DCT or wavelet, for purposes of this patent.
Also, its going to be a bit of a hunt for prior art, because it was filed in 1986.
IANAL
Test your net with Netalyzr
In fact, the royalties went to Unisys.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Apple isn't strangling the adoption, they are coining a term to describe a technology... they did it with the "AirPort" too for wireless networks.
This is a similar concept as what Intel did with Pentium (the original one) rather than using 80586 to describe the generation of processors following the 80486 (the 80 usually dropped) they coined the term "Pentium" which left the "cheap chip" companies like AMD and Cyrix to come up with names of their own to describe the same technology.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Even Sony tried to capture a market share with "iLink" which is again, IEEE 1394 with a different name.
AF-Design, web development.
I may be mistaking this with Trademarks, but don't you have to defend your patents, I mean come on Jpegs have been used since the beginning of the web, wouldn't the fact that some MAJOR software companies have been using it since at least 1996 mean this company doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Oh well maybe I'll read the article now
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
have to be protected or a holder runs the risk of losing those rights, correct?
Is there precedence for something similar for patent holders?
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
As far as patents are concerned, Laches only applies on an infringer-by-infringer basis, and I'm pretty sure only (in effect) to back-royalties.
DNA just wants to be free...
I have a combined ten patents issued and in process in this specific field, so I believe I can call myself an expert in this matter.
... where the 4x6 is a run length encoding.
The claims in this patent cover digital streams which tend to come in tuples, possibly with appended data. Something like this:
(1,4) (1,3), (1,6), (4,6), (3,6), (9,6)
It specifically claims the separation of these tuples into separate run-length encoded streams.
In my example above, it might be:
(3x1, 4, 3, 9)
(4, 3, 4x6)
There are some further claims about coding signs and amplitude, and some table lookup mechanism to support the above.
The trouble is (for the patent holders), this is in NO WAY how JPEG works.
JPEG divides a video stream into blocks (8x8 and 16x16) of pixels, and runs them through a descrete cosine transform. Basically, this turns the representation of the picture into level and percentages of vertical and horizontal waveforms of various frequencies. It then quantizes these values (reducing their size and precision), and orders them from low frequency to high frequency. Then it subjects the whole thing to a run-length algorithm optimized to eliminate zeros (which high quant values tend to do). JPEG is a lossy algorithm that takes advantage of the fact that our eyes don't pick out errors in high frequency components as well as we do low frequency.
About the only claim this patent that's similar to JPEG is the Run Length Encoding. But that is covered by prior art that goes back forever.
according to "man find" :
I don't know about the rest of you, but I think the Ivy League Uni's would do the world a favor if they quit churning out lawyers like Microsoft does hotfixes
The Ivy Leage lawyers I know (and I know many of them) don't spend time suing McDonals for excessivly hot beverages. They spend time *defending* companies from suits. (Or they spend time putting deals together, but that is another story).
I guess thats one way to put your self on M$ scopes... but usually you don't want to make people with $40+billion in cash mad at you... they will buy you or sue you into the poor house. Will see how things stand in a few months
How about Slashdot patents all of the other compression formats like Gif (I'm not sure if it's patented or not) and allow full use of it to users so something like this won't happen again.
"However, companies have an obligation to make products that are safe."
Just like the weapons, fossil fuels, car and knife industries!
There are risks involved when using most products in a manner that was not intended, driving a car and drinking coffee is not safe for reasons other than 3rd degree burns and cannot be considered as intended use. It is perfectly reasonable to serve near-boiling temperature coffee (what is generally considered "fresh") and let the customer decide when to start consuming the beverage. This lawsuit is ridiculous, and this posting is as off topic as a panda in switzerland so don't be afraid to mod it such. I am not a lawyer either.
Does anyone else see this as a general tech form of the illegal Cyber Squatting procedures? Someone buys a domain, possibly with the knowledge that the domain will soon be wanted by someone with deep pockets, holds out until the deep pockets offer to cough up enough cash, and then sells. Here we have a company that claims to have rights to a technology, attempts to spread the technology as a standard so deep pockets begin using the technology (deep pockets = the public and companies developing products for the public), holds out until enough pockets are using the technology, and then claims rights to the technology and asks everyone to cough up. The only problem they have is getting at the individual user, so they attack the companies that service the individual user... but then what happens? The companies just soak up the loss, right? No we soak up the loss in the form of higher prices. This patent claim is complete bull terds, and I hope that someone (some company) will be able to prove so, as I would rather soak up 5 million or so in attorney fees than 15 million or so for every major company that produces jpeg creation and manipulation software or components.
Do you really think they can enforce this patent? Do you think they can go after every computer user in the world (literally!). They may try to take a few big companies to court since they have the money, but there is no way they can win. You can't let some technology go around the industry for years and years and then suddenly patent and claim royalties. I don't have any references but I have heard of companies trying this in the past and being laughed out of court.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
The problem illustrated by the article seems to be two-fold:
-One: The USPTO has to change the way they award patents/tradmarks. Claims such as the ones we've been seeing recently will piss off enough people that legislative action will be inevitable. Spam will have it's day once enough congressmen see an incentive to approach the subject properly (positive reaction) or they get targetted themselves (negative reaction). Either way, the issue gets the attention from decision makers. So you know, I'd honestly prefer the first method.
-Two: Less obvious an answer is that the software industry expanded too fast. Companies are pressured to delivery products without much/any testing. The speculative stock values of dot-coms fell apart and agitated investors pressure the companies to do whatever to resurrect their portfolios. It's human nature to want something more when it's taken away. Getting more on topic, the extreme speculation that was seen by all a couple years ago found it's way into the business models of the same companies through questionable patentand trademark moves (I can't think of a copyright example just now wrt computers, but there are tons of suspicious claims in the music industry).
Then there's the issue of people who jump on the bandwagon. I've run into those who use some net jargon and offer to design a site for me or friends. The first question I ask: "What's the HTML/http stand for?" <10% know the answer. Too many people claiming to know anything.
This is not my sig.
Yes. The goal of due diligence is to avoid exposure to litigation. I'm not saying that all patents are valid, or that all infringement suits have merit. I'm saying that it's foolish business practice to put yourself in harm's way without assessing the likelihood of litigation ahead of time. Steps taken early on save money later. I'm not playing devil's advocate (and I'm not trolling, although I've been modded down in this thread, supposedly for doing so). I'm not saying that the patent is valid, or that BT, Amazon, etc. are in the right in previous frivolous lawsuits. I'm merely saying that anyone in business today has to know what the environment is, and has to proceed cautiously. They can't claim that they were caught unaware of the potential liability of moving forward blindly, particularly when the tools to assess their risk are so easily and cheaply available to everyone.
With real property (land), there is the concept of eminent domain. It says that the people (gov't) can take an indiviuals property if it is needed for the general good. This is how they get the land for roads and such. A "fair value" is decided (with the help of the courts if neccesary) and paid.
Perhaps this concept should be applied to patents too for als sorts of technology (like life saving drugs).
The JPEG standard is the result of a cooperative project by people in the digital imaging field. Isn't that a strong argument against this patent?
As Jeffrey D. Ullman said in his 2000 Knuth-Prize Lecture: "An idea is nonobvious if it would not be discovered by one of 'ordinary skill in the art' when the idea was needed."
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Guess I'll switch to png now...
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
Nope, you can definitely patent a gene.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I've been using PNG for a while now and try to use only PNG's when I can, but sometimes I need the lossy JEPG for really large pics. Does this mean that a lossy PNG is just around the corner?
The JPEG consortium may have formed in 1985, but the .jpg file format didn't come along until 1991, and that was based on considerations of a bunch of compression schemes considered in 1987, after the patent was filed.
This patent basically seems to claim ownership over all variants of least-squares fitting for image analysis (though admittedly I haven't read it too carefully, I might be missing something).
Wavelet compression, when you boil down the math, is solving a least-squares problem. In fact, least-squares problems like this are such an incredibly common tool in computer science that it's embarrassing the patent was granted.
-N.
So "bug PNG" is not a good alternative to JPG. But what about plain old PNG? Maybe that would work with fewer bugs and stuff?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
As per HeUniques post below...
:)
Sony said "look, kid, here's a hundred bucks, go screw yourself, or we'll sue you to oblivion."
s/'hundred bucks'/'$15 million'/
which is about the same, to Sony. Still, it's $15 million that Forgent didn't have before, the bastards.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
I do not think that everyone besides commercial efforts that can afford fees like $500-$1000 US should be prohibited from developing software.
It's not like anyone else has ever produced something important.
DNA just wants to be free...
Would you care what people thought of your company, as long as you are guaranteed to make millions off of this? Neither would I ..
http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/lzw__licen se__english.htm
Unisys will happily sell you a one year license for $5000, to cover you in case you end up using software that itself is not LZW licensed. kind of like insurance.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Wasn't asking what it was - just clarifying what the contraction of the subject expands to.
Burn you're JPEGs => Burn you are JPEGs
Of course anyone that thinks about it will realize that the huge number of people making this mistake just don't know what they are writing. Luckily you aren't one of those - you just don't have all of your reading comprehension neurons firing.
Most people making this mistake also don't understand the differences between the following:
to vs too
of vs off
I'm not sure if CmdrTaco and his gang have caught on, either.
I patented this, so pay up trolls!
I think you might run into some trouble with prior use...
From the patent it is obvious that this is a video (frame to frame) compression technique designed to maintain a near-constant bandwidth by varying the quality. The quality is changed by discarding DCT coefficients from a motion compensated delta between two frames of video. This is in effect the core of the JPEG algorithm when applied to a single frame; however, this is not claimed in the patent, and this same technique is mentioned in the prior art (background of the invention), suggesting it is not new. Applicable part of the patent: Cosine Transform The coefficient differences between the input pixels from the present frame on lines 5 and the estimations from the previously reconstructed frame on lines 3 are formed by the difference circuit 10 on lines 23 and are expressed as follows: e.sub.n (j,k)=f.sub.n (j,k)-.rho.(j,k)f.sub.N-1 (j+.DELTA.j,k+.DELTA.k) Eq. (4) where .DELTA.j and .DELTA.k represent the vector values for the best match determined by the motion detector and where .rho.(j,k) represents the estimation. These differences within a N.times.N block are cosine transformed in transformer 11 to form the coefficient differences on lines 24. The cosine transform is defined as follows: ##EQU3## where w=u or v where (j,k) and (u,v) represent indices in the horizontal and vertical directions for the pixel difference and coefficient difference blocks, respectively, and where C(w) represents C(u) or C(v). The cosine transform restructures the spatial domain data into the coefficient domain such that it will be beneficial to the subsequent coding and redundancy removal processes.
Normalization
The coefficient differences, E.sub.n (u,v), are scaled according to a feedback normalization factor, D, on lines 25, from the output rate buffer 15 according to the relation,
I.sub.n (u,v)=E.sub.n (u,v)/D Eq. (6)
The scaling process adjusts the range of the coefficient differences such that a desired number of code bits can be used during the coding process.
Quantization
The quantization process in unit 13 is any conventional linear or non-linear quantization. The quantization process will set some of the differences to zeros and leave a limited number of significant other differences to be coded. The quantized coefficient differences on lines 28 are represented as follows:
I.sub.n (u,v)=Q[I.sub.n (u,v)] Eq. (7)
where Q[ ] is a quantization function.
It should be noted that a lower bound is determined for the normalization factor in order to introduce meaningful coefficient differences to the coder. Generally speaking, setting the minimum value of D to one is sufficient for a low rate compression applications involving transform blocks of 16 by 16 pixels. In this case the worst mean square quantization error is less than 0.083. This mean square error corresponds to a peak signal-to-quantization-noise ratio of 40.86 db which is relatively insignificant for low rate applications.
I learned on /.
your definition is correct: a 3rd degree burn is a full thickness burn
although the skin may not be "burned away" (as in a 4th degree burn, which causes damage to the underlying tissue as well), the skin involved in the 3rd degree burn has lost all of its vascular (blood) supply so will *usually* require grafting unless the area is very small and can contract on its own
Why do so many people hate lawyers?
They hate what they fear.
Why do so many people fear lawyers?
They fear years of research and work being stolen from them because they are unable to work the system the way Forgent or Microsoft or BT or Amazon can. They fear some white trash bimbo is going to pour coffee on herself at your family restaraunt and suddenly your livlihood is gone. Or, perhaps, some redneck is going to slip walking up the steps to your house and steal your home from you. They fear being screwed by the people who are supposed to advise them in the intricacies of law.
They fear being rendered helpless in a system that ONLY rewards those with money and those with the most expensive lawyers.
You claim that everyone should assess their risk (using the tools that are, supposedly, "easily and cheaply available to everyone") and it's foolish "to put yourself in harm's way without accessing the likelihood of litigation".
I think the perception of most of the citizens of the USA is this: you are at risk for being sued at any moment of any day for doing any action at any time for the rest of your natural life and extending many years into the lives of your descendants. And, whether or not you take advantage of these "cheap" tools, someone can hire more expensive tools to rob you of your work, your business, and your home and there is nothing you can do about it.
Anyway, I'm sorry you lost Karma. I guess some of the moderators can't separate their feelings about the failings of the system from the postings of those that think it is worthy of being defended.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Got a link to that information? ...
I went to jpeg.org and couldn't find it
But it fits their organization's user naming convention:
richard_synder@forgent.com
CEO, Forgent Networks
There are plenty of shysters out there in the computer industry it seems. Growth and success has attracted them. But government, the same one that's out to protect us customers from getting screwed, is their enabler, be it from anti-trust suits, software patents, cryptography regulations, or inroads on fair use.
Some people seem to be confused about the patent filing. The JPEG compression technology was indeed a collaborative effort that would require a lot of audacity for someone to claim as their own. The issue is that at the heart of the JPEG compression technology at the time it was made was the algorithm here [uspto.gov] that was filed on October 27, 1986. The issue is that just now, after the JPEG compression standard has been in place for years, the patent owner chose to begin enforcement. I'm not sure if any "squatter's rights" hold for patents, but I doubt it considering Sony already paid Forgent off. I suppose that if someone wrote a way to make JPEGs work as they do without using this algorithm (a silly suggestion, I know, but to prove a point) that Forgent would have no claim on JPEG technology.
~Ben
I wish there was a comments "Hall of Fame".
Can all the companies who spent millions developing and nuturing software to refine and encourage jpeg use get reimbursed for their R+D costs.
This patent is circa 1986. Since it is
before GAAT went into effect, I assume it's
valid until 2003 (17 years). Any lawyers
out there to confirm that people could just
wait it out and not even litigate?
Frankly, it sounds like what they are doing is borderline barratry.
This sig no verb.
Balmer's a big fella. It'd be funny if he went into a Chris Farley-like rage and tried to suplex the twiggy lawyers that brought this to them. Bill would just be sitting back in the large leather chair with a white persian cat, penting his fingers together like Mr Burns, watching the carnage ensue.
;)
I was going to suggest you were deeply disturbed, but I had the exact same mental picture.
Just before Balmer goes into his maniacal rage, I imagined him nearly frothing at the mouth and telling the "yahoos" they'll end up living in a van down by the river!
Hey, it could happen!
The irony here is that the graphics industry turned to JPEG after some company pulled the same stuff with GIF.
This crap just has to stop...and why can't the legal precedent obtained with RAMBUS apply here?
Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent's IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue.
Forgent networks are a local company here in Austin, TX. The local paper the Austin American statesmen had a story on them a week ago. The company has been suffering huge losses from there main business, when, one day they realized they had some useful patents from other acquired companies. One of which just secured them a deal with Sony, which they made about 15m on (minus 10m for lawyers)
So the attitude there is to become a "IP" company and milk profits from patents that they hold, they now offer deep incentives for employees that think of patentable ideas, and are (of course) predicting large revenue gains from enforcing current patents. The downside to this is that many of there patents expire in about 4 years, so they better hurry up with the litigation if they want to make any money.
I should note that Forgent is not a huge company, so there going to have a focused set of civil suites to companies that A: have deep pockets, B: are profiting off patents they own.
-Jon
this is my sig.
There are many kinds of lawyers... the kind you (and I) hate are the trial lawyers. They are represented as a body by the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA), which is, I believe, one of the largest donors to the Democratic party, probably to the Republican party and almost certainly to the election campaigns of judges all over the US. I have heard the Democratic Party referred to as a "wholly-owned subsidiary of the ATLA." This is why we can't get tort reform, why people sue for stupid reasons, why most companies would rather settle out of court than go to the lottery of trial-by-jury, why our insurance rates are so high, etc. Call your municipality and see how much they pay out in lawsuits and insurance for slip and fall cases. I know in New York City it is an astronomical amount. Your tax dollars at work. Find out how much a company in which you own stock pays for director's and officers insurance - that's money that comes right out of your stock price.
Just thought we should distinguish between the ambulance chasers and the run-of-the-mill lawyers who are sitting in their little offices writing contracts 16 hours a day. The latter aren't villains, though they are a drag on the efficiency of our economy: if there was some tort reform, we could put some of them to work doing something useful.
If the patent expires after 17 years, that means they only have till October 2004, to try to get lincense fees. I wonder when the LZW patent expires...
The problem is, JPEG wasn't just a product of big business. JPEG was the result of efforts by many people in the Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG was designed to be an open, royalty-free standard (although there are provisions in JPEG for some types of compression that are covered by patent, as I recall, and these alternate compression schemes are not widely implemented).
I know JPEG 2000 has even more potential land mines in it... someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't JPEG 2000 include support for wavelet compression? I know wavelets were an IP minefield at one time because several companies claimed fundamental patents on wavelet technology.
Surely, someone in the working group checked on the fundamental technology to see what was covered by patent and what wasn't. However, a best-faith effort, even to the extent of hiring attorneys to do a patent search (something only big corporations have the deep pockets to subsidize) isn't a guarantee that nothing will be missed. And opportunists can always swoop in and claim that some overly-broad patent applies.
I think that frivolous lawsuits of this nature are only going to serve to stifle the development of open, royalty-free standards. They're also going to insure that very little original development or research is done outside of large corporations, since nobody wants to assume personal liability for running afoul of patent nazis.
Hopefully, someone will step up to the plate, since JPEG is so widely used, and will defend against these sleazebags. I remember a similar situation not so long ago, where Apple was forced to defend against a company suing over ColorSync, claiming that this technology infringed their patent...
It would be nice to discuss this matter with a lawyer and see what they have to say, since I am fairly certain that there are penalties for failure to enforce one's patent rights.
Time for another wacky ogg format for stilss :) On a more serious note, presuming that they do not infringe on other patents, would jpeg2000 or a 'lossy' png be a feasible replacement. Mainly I was wordering about png, since jpeg2000 is obviously a workable solution if not patent infringing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Is there anyone with half a brain cell left in the patent office? These people should be prevented from breeding.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
The US Patent Trademark Office is supposed to promote the industrial and technological progress of the nation and strengthen the economy. I do not see how allowing an obtuse corporate microsalesman to stifle an 11 year old freely distributed world standard is in the best interest of our nation.
...
r em.htm
Reminds me of the compression war of '88.
"Back then people compressed the files with a program called ARC by Systems Enhancements Associates (SEA).
ARC would take the original files and compress them into one file with the extension of ARC. When you downloaded this file from the BBS you unarced it by using ARC.EXE. This was great until a gentleman named Phil Katz came up with the idea of improving ARC.
See, Phil found out you could speed the compression process and even make the files more compressed. Instead of one file for compression and decompression, Phil made two. The result was PKARC for compression and PKXARC for decompression. This is where the fun began.
SEA got really ticked that Phil had done a better job of compression and decompression while maintaining compatibility. In the great American way, instead of competing and making ARC better, they sued.
A few months later, PKZIP was released and that was it. I can't find a Systems Enhancement Associates website, but PKWare is still in business. Sysops dropped almost every other compression type and went with ZIP and as they say, that is history."
So go ahead "Forgent Networks". We'll find a better format.
We miss ya Phil.
http://www.compunotes.com/OpinionSection/philkatz
Why is it that no one has made an open source equivalent to bountyquest ?
(i.e one using the power of open source to defend algorithms used in open source products)
Unfortunately I can't get to the site, but from what the abstract says, this doesn't apply to JPEG at all. Is there some sort of document explaining why this is supposed to cover JPEG, or is it simply wishful thinking?
JPEG uses the DCT ("discrete cosine transform") on 8x8 blocks to separate high frequencies from low, then drops out high frequencies and does standard lossless compression. This abstract apparently describes some method of digitizing a signal (apparently in a one-dimensional way) and using standard lossless compression on it.
I wonder if they got permission from MS to use that Windows XP graphic on the main page. Maybe someone should drop the dime...
Now I'll have to convert my entire child porn collection!
(it's a joke - Laugh)
Between 1987 and 1994, GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) peacefully became the most popular file format for archiving and exchanging computer images. At the end of December 1994, CompuServe Inc. and Unisys Corporation announced to the public that developers would have to pay a license fee in order to continue to use technology patented by Unisys in certain categories of software supporting the GIF format. These first statements caused immediate reactions and some confusion. As a longer term consequence, it appears likely that GIF will be replaced and extended by new file formats, but not so before the expiration of the patent which caused so much debate.
t ml
Among the first reactions, some bulletin board systems had all GIF files deleted from their hard disks (or converted into JPEG format). Common remarks included:
"PROTEST OF NEW COMPUSERVE-UNISYS GIF USAGE TAX !!"
"They [CompuServe] seem to think that GIF is the greatest thing since free online magazines."
"The announcement by CompuServe and Unisys that users of the GIF image format must register by January 10 and pay a royalty or face lawsuits for their past usage, is the online communications community's equivalent of the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor."
http://www.cloanto.com/users/mcb/19950127giflzw.h
It's doubtful that a patent would be valid for wavelets since the math has been around for a long time and rediscovered multiple times. Rather it is the compression techniques for the wavelet coefficients that have the most potential for being patented. I believe the zero-tree technique is patented , which is suprising since it is not a leap to come up with it.
Read the abstract again:
The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus
useful in *video compression systems*.
(*emphasis* is mine). Given what they do for a living (look at their main
page, and given the above sentence, the patent is IMHO restricting itself
to video systems, i.e. movies, tv, moving images. As I read that,
there's a strong case to be made that the execs and legal heads at that
corporation do not understand the restrictions the patent places on
itself.
Disclaimer: IANAPE (I am not a patent expert).
-- This
I don't know if one of the 750 posts prior to this hit on this point, so here goes.
The trick with patents is that they need to be actively enforced by the patent holder (not the police). Therefore, it is up to the patent holder to watch over the market and make sure no one is stealing the IP.
Now, like laws, patents cannot be selectively protected and prosecuted, so I cannot sue one company for using my patent without a license and not another... from what I understand is that if you want to allow a company to use your tech for free, you have to explicitly say so. If you don't, you're passive acceptance of it's use may imply a negligence to police your own patent, and it makes lawsuits around your patent that much harder.
Now, consider that this tech has been used passively by literally millions of people for years. I'm guessing that even if this patent is legit. they've essentially given up their right to enforce the patent.
The law is supposed to work this way for the very purpose of preventing ambushes. I can only hope that it works out this way.
The parent makes a damn good point and should be rewarded.
PEACE
For a time, you had to submit the circuit for your algorithm. Then the circuit clause was dropped.
It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Every company would probably just submit boilerplate along with every patent in the form of a mask for a 4,000 gate 6502 processor. (The 6502, or variants thereof, was the processor used in the Apple II, Atari 2600, C=64, and NES.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
How long before we suddenly find out that Al Gore patented the internet?
Not all lawyers are "evil". It's that 99% of lawyers that ruin it for the other 1%.
cpeterso
I have pictures of the cutest toddler on Planet Earth. I have about 1000 aunts and uncles (each the center of another distribution network) and 20000 cousins to send those pictures to. (Yes, I'm exaggerating a bit.) What do you suppose is the proportion between the number of Sky's relatives who can decode a jpg file, and the number who can decode a png file?
Alright! A new file extension, .cif , "Crap Image Format". Where can I get pam_anderson.cif ?
...it'd be fairly easy to demonstrate prior use on all three of these patents.
/. but there's a ton of prior use there, too. Oh, well, I guess I gotta keep working.
In the same vein, I was going to patent making claims about patents on
Or, hey, how about a patent on claiming prior use exemptions on a patent? Wouldn't this allow a corporation to patent anything and make money on either side of the patent fight? Oh, shit, now I've done it...
Virg
I get the distinct feeling that there are a lot of bottom feeders looking for a payout before dissolving back into the slime... Essentially they take a narrow patent and interpret it in the broadest possible sence (Egged on no doubt by their lawyers).
: . . .
..."
A company named EFI has tried a similar tactic. Now don't feel too smug because you're a small developer - they're targeting *ALL* developers large and small... This won't effect the large companies but will stifle the individual contributor!
"I would like you all know this
EFI ( www.efi.com ) is sending legal citations (Texas Court) to more than
200 small , medium or large companies which created any image editing
software that is able to scan , manipulate and print pictures . They claim
these companies ( even very small shareware companies) are infringing their
(year 1984) patent about scanning , color manipulating trough RGB or CMYK
systems and printing pictures . This sounds just like the other famous claim
of "Unisys" about the gif patent
Among those companies have been cited Microsoft ( Picture it! and Photodraw
software), Corel (photopaint), Ulead(photoimpact and photoexpress) and Jasc (Paint Shop Pro)
It seems that Adobe and Xerox registered and paid a fee in 1988 for using
that patent in their software . So they are the only few companies who are
not involved in this infringement
So if you are willing to make your own image editor I would think twice
about it : it's sad but true
[Extracted from Google's newsgroup archive of borland.public.delphi.non-technical]
Note that there's nothing obvious on their site: [http://www.efi.com/]
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
From: the traditions, techniques, ingredients and recipes
JAPANESE cooking :
"Green tea should not be brewed with boiling water. The better the quality of tea, the less hot the water should be.
"The tea [gyokuro] should be brewed in warm water, at about 50 degrees Celsuis/122 degrees Farenheit...."
Although I don't drink much hot drink, I hate how restaurants serve coffee and tea at scalding temperatures.
Looking at their actual patent, it looks like it describes MPEG compression better than it does JPEG images... The whole patent revolves around compressing a video stream to save bandwidth:
= PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='4,698,672'.WKU.&OS=PN/4,698,672& RS=PN/4,698,672 [U.S. Patent Office]
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1
I wonder if this means they're going to go after the MPAA for violating their patents on DVDs...
You should have tested converting, say, a
Bad test. I did just that (started with a 300dpi
Tea and coffee are the same thing? Consult any book about coffee. Ideal temp around 200 degrees.
But, guess what? The most basic and fundamental of concepts in this field was covered by patents. This drove all companies and researchers away from the field. Today, I hardly hear about it.
The whole concept of patenting an algorithm is stupid. I am sure there are thousands of other promising areas where further research could have greatly enhance our lives - except that greedy patents make it impossible to pursue research in that area.
People who argue that patents give incentives to innovators fail to realize that an idea is only a spark. It can realize its full potential only if a lot of further research and development is done on it. However, the very same patents serve as deterrants for people who want to do further research.
Patents halt innovation, not the other way around!
All your favorite sites in one place!
1. File compression patent
2. ?
3. Profit!
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Man... does this cry "Sell Short" on their stocks or what? Are they publically traded? You'll make a killing when they go down in flames after everyone cold shoulders them for trying to hijaak the whole shebang.
The Patent in question (OCT 6 1987):? Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='4,698,672'.WKU.&OS=PN/4,698,672& RS=PN/4,698,672
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION
Title: A COMBINED INTRAFRAME AND INTERFRAME TRANSFORM CODING SYSTEM
Ser. No.: 479,766 Filed: 83/03/28 (now abandoned)
"The patent describes a single-pass digital video compression system which implements a two-dimensional cosine transform with intraframe block-to-block comparisons of transform coefficients without need for preliminary statistical matching or preprocessing.
"
There's the DCT part that both JPEG and MPEG use, and likewise a whack of other video compression technologies.
"Each frame of the video image is divided into a predetermined matrix of spatial subframes or blocks. The system performs a spatial domain to transform domain transformation of the picture elements of each block to provide transform coefficients for each block. The system adaptively normalizes the transform coefficients so that the system generates data at a rate determined adaptively as a function of the fullness of a transmitter buffer. The transform coefficient data thus produced is encoded in accordance with amplitude Huffman codes and zero-coefficient runlength Huffman codes which are stored asynchronously in the transmitter buffer. The encoded data is output from the buffer at a synchronous rate for transmission through a limited-bandwidth medium. The system determines the buffer fullness and adaptively controls the rate at which data is generated so that the buffer is never completely emptied and never completely filled."
Yes, this sounds exactly like JPEG.
A patent granted in 1987 will expire in 2004.
You will notice if you read further articles (such as the one at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26272.html that they only acquired the patent in 1997, from compression labs... which means they have only had it for... 5 years. Who knows why they are only going after it now, though.
Send them a TIFF of your bare ass, and copy every address on their website. Please be sure to send TIFFs instead of JPEGs. After all, they should get to pay for the bandwidth that they want royalties for others to conserve...
They can suck my Uncompressed JPEG.
What a joke.
> They fear being rendered helpless in a system that ONLY rewards those with money and those with the most expensive lawyers.
No, the system is built entirely to steal from the middle. It is an equal opportunity lottery open to anybody, and does so by doleing out "free" insurance funds.
Insurance funds are paid for by the middle. There are too few "rich" and the "poor" don't play.
I visited the Forgent site and searched for the word "patent" and came up with this link: http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ti cker=FORG&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=314 044
Leave it to people in Florida to mistake one thing for another: Can't amputate the correct leg, can't mark the correct ballot box.
Fundamentally there is nothing wrong with this. They bought the company and are now asserting their IP. Mind you they're working hard on commiting public suicide with the relations fiasco this is likely to be.
What I suspect will happen will be the same thing as Rambus. They will ultimately be forced to stand by the prior companies commitment to free licensing terms. Which is a good thing.
If it was the same company and not simply someone that bought them this would scream bait and switch and other sleazy things. Essentially now that JPG proliferation is the defacto standard they're now attempting to collect royalties.
All of this simply solifies my belief that the underlying fundamental OS should be open source as should the standards that allow computers to communicate. However proprietary software for programs and games is fine, within reason.
Standard formats for everything that people will use for business, documents, spreadsheets, XML perhaps...
"They are already is"?
Zeosync Software Download
Self-extractor
Contains the total of Zeosync's work. Uses their own self-extractor, applied recursively to reduce the size to zero bytes. Now that's compression!
The web page with the press release contained only one JPEG, but many GIFs.
-- yawn. --
You can't claim damages.. but you CAN still stop them from using it from the present day and onwards unless they pay you the royalties you want. And that can be significant.
Plenty of Gods throughout history, prior to the currently reigning Jehovah/Jah/Allah/Majaba , demanded of their subjects goat burning, virgin impaling, and more. (and Jehovah in the past did, apparently).
So, if we have to go back to throwing people in Volcanoes - I'd say the Fortune 500 CEOs wuld be good sacrifices.
I can just imagine the litigation costs alone let alone the stuff going through congress right now.
If they allow this to go through without a challenge... Then our country's government has completely gone astray and is no longer in and of the people.
I remember Jpeg as being developed for the "community" and source code and examples abound... They can't all of a sudden "call in the reins" on this and start charging everyone.... Ludicrist...
I smell a corrupt government... big time... someone was either bought off or is bought in on this to make hoards of money...
I smell a rat...
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
How about a patent for the process of registering one's unique implementation of a process, method or physical device for the purpose of proving original creativity and control?
Thats a good one. Then every motherfucker who wants to patent their lying buyllshit has to deal with your lawyers, HAHA
Seriously, thought, there's no need to panic. Patent or no patent, Forgent cannot do jack about the current JPEG situation. The format is so widely used that any attempt to regulate it or pry cash out of our hands would result in their being ignored and/or vilified. Sod 'em.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
"Forgent", as in Forged Entity. Somone has a great sense of humor.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
I sure as hell don't want 180 degree coffee.. I hardly ever get coffee at McSchmonald's because it's too damn hot to drink! (even if you sip it through the little stirrer..)
I used to be of the opinion that the coffee-settlement was a stupid too.. But I didn't know that 700 cases had already happened, and McDonald's did nothing about it (even as simple as printing "Caution: Hot!" on the cup.
As for people communuting and drinking it later, what about people who don't? I would bet that at least 30% of coffee purchased at breakfast is consumed in-store, probably more so for coffee purchased with lunches (does anyone drink coffee with lunch?)
Yeah, and HP will just eat the costs...
:D
Did I say that? Nope, sure didn't - when I say "HP won't be happy", I mean that HP will sue saying the patent is not enforceable. Or, alternately, they could pull a Sony, offer up a pittance to get a license, and then forget about it, and only moderately affect the prices. Nowhere did I state that any big company would eat the costs - read my post again.
Maybe 3 years ago, but you can bet it will nearly IMMEDIATELY transfer into higher product prices for the consumer.
Wow, its amazing how few people really get economics.
What, like you? Business generally don't eat costs, not three years ago, not now, not ever. Here's a hint: read posts (and by 'read' I mean 'understand' and not 'apply phonetic techniques to sound out words') before replying. You've made it clear that you have all the brains/experience of an arrogant high school student. OTOH, at least you posted AC and saved yourself the embarassment of us knowing your name!
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Taken from: http://www.jpeg.org/public/jpeghomepage.htm
"JPEG is short for the 'Joint Photographic Experts Group'. This was (and is) a group of experts nominated by national standards bodies and major companies to work to produce standards for continuous tone image coding. The 'joint' refers to its status as a committee working on both ISO and ITU-T standards. The 'official' title of the committee is ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 Working Group 1, and is responsible for both JPEG and JBIG standards.
The best known standard from JPEG is IS 10918-1 (ITU-T T.81), which is the first of a multi-part set of standards for still image compression. A basic version of the many features of this standard, in association with a file format placed into the public domain by C-Cube Microsystems (JFIF) is what most people think of as JPEG!
Hopefully this site will improve your knowledge of the real work of the JPEG committee."
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
found it online, not a difficult search to do. For those of you too lazy, click this underlined hunk of text
Sea enforced their rights on ARC then the most popular PC compressed archive format, people revolted and PKZIP was born. ZIP is now the standard.
what about IW44? what's the standing on that? and why isn't that used more often? it's about as good as jpeg 2000 and is already here.
:T:R:A:N:S:
If Zeosync is gone, where did the technology go? (Into a black hole?) I suppose it was sold to some other company, who perhaps is sitting on it like Palm is sitting on the desktop BeOS, but couldn't that be considered "stifling innovation"?
I wonder if their patent covers jpeg-viruses as well.
Hello, same anonymous coward here replying to self to tell all you knee-jerk reactionaries out there to put down the pitchforks. And whatever you do, don't invest in this company.
First, the patent talks about 2 encoding schemes and applying them to various scenarios.
A) Run-length encoding the amplitude of digitally sampled signal. An idea older than time, but not used in JPEG, so who cares.
B) Huffman encoding the amplitude of a digitally sampled signal. David Huffman (at latest) came up with the encoding scheme in 1953 (basing off him being in grad school when making it and age at death), so I think we can establish prior art.
But the real issue is JPEG, which is the lossy end of the coding scheme. This involves (excuse my math) a Discrete Cosine Transformation to translate the amplitues into the coefficients of the frequencies being encoded.
Huffman encoding doesn't come in until the lossless compression stage, which is technically not JPEG, but JFIF, the file system wrapped around the JPEG encoding scheme that makes JPEG encodning into a JPEG file we all know and love... a minor distinction, but again, any monkey can show prior art.
Snippet from the /. link (bold text added to clarify the obvious)
"Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent's IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue."
Note is doesn't mention developing the technology. What a bunch of unscrupulous wh*res.
Do these pattents also apply for Europe? Are they world-wide? Because I don't remember having seen this type of things in The Netherlands.
"those that do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it" or something like that.
Another HUGE reason that people want their coffee 180+ degrees is because they add cold milk or creme, which significantly cools it down.
Remember years ago compuserve tried to do the same thing with the .gif format. They succeded!! Thats when some people started the .png format.
My hope is that the jpeg 2000 format is not owned by them.
Any reaction from the jpeg group? www.jpeg.org
But don't Pantents have to be defended, or they lose it, specifically to prevent something like this from happening?
...to Motion JPEG video compression?
I notice that was availible as part of older releases of Quicktime... perhaps this is a Motion JPEG patent? OR is Motion JPEG just a bunch of JPEG images in a sequience without any variance in quality, as you described above?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
God Patents Randomness; Demands Royalties
-elmar-
No, the system is built entirely to steal from the middle.
:-P
So, I don't like them either.
Anybody who goes skiing every winter and then complains that they cannot afford a graphing calculator to pass their math classes with. . . .
feh
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
The only statutory penalty for prior failure to enforce one's patent rights in the U.S. is a limitation on damages under 35 USC 286 "Time limitation on damages". That limits recovery of damages to a period of 6 years prior to the filing of the claim of infringement in court.
Doesn't fit But I Play One On TV. (BIPOOTV) Kindly de-acronymify?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
They fear being rendered helpless in a system that ONLY rewards those with money and those with the most expensive lawyers.
IANAL.
Look at what you wrote. Setting aside your cheap ethnic bigotry that only "rednecks" sue anyone, do you really think that "white trash bimbos" and "rednecks" qualify as "those with money" and "those with the most expensive lawyers"?
This is how it works. Slashdotters, take notice.
If you Slip and Fall, or Pour Hot Coffee on yourself, you have what is called a tort claim (we will ignore whether or not these claims have merit). A tort is a legally recognized injury. You can sue for the tort of wrongful death, or the tort of fraud, or the tort of negligence. Your state's law governs what the legal requirements are for a court to find that "fraud" or "negligence" existed. What you are suing for is a) monetary damages, i.e. your hospital bills b) punitive damages, i.e. a monetary punishment to make the wrongdoer think twice about ever doing it again, and/or c) attorney's fees.
But most people, especially those who have fallen and can't get up, don't have enough money to hire an attorney by the hour. What is usually arranged is what's called a "contingent fee contract". Basically, the lawyer gets 1/3 of whatever is recovered. (That is why you see those "you don't pay if you don't win" television commercials for lawyers.)
What does this encourage? Dishonest PLAINTIFFS, not dishonest lawyers. Since filing a lawsuit becomes risk-free as long as you can pretend you have been grievously injured, it's worth trying your luck even if you have done something monstrously stupid and injured yourself. And idiot JURIES can be called upon to give ridiculous damage awards.
The system does NOT favor the rich in tort litigation. Sorry. All juries see is a bank account from which to give out a massive judgment. All attorneys see is that an endless assortment of greedy idiots will show up at their doors demanding massive rewards for self-inflicted stupidity. All lawyers do is facilitate the wishes of greedy plaintiffs.
Who is helpless? You were right, it's business owners (and anybody whom a jury might think could distribute big bucks to someone who tried drinking Drano to see what would happen). Do you notice the inconsistency in thinking that The Rich set up a system which screws themselves over?
What really happened is that populist legislatures, and populist judges, trying to DIMINISH the power of "The Man" and INCREASE the power of the "People", created our present system. Tort lawsuits exist, and were in modern times generally created, to favor the little man. The problem is that the balance swung too far. "Suit to recover because your employer has insanely dangerous machinery" became "suit to recover because your boss harmed your self-esteem".
What does this have to do with patent law? Absolutely nothing. This question of whether a company's patent on JPEGs is enforceable has absolutely nothing to do with frivolous lawsuits like the kinds you described. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the honesty of the legal profession.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Thank goodness.
With the help of this company, we'll all be able to use lynx (or one of the other text browsers) to effectively surf again!
Viva!
~Acheron
Perhaps the best way to fight this stupidity is to entirely ignore software patents. Let them fuss and fume and try to take everyone to court as they scrounge around trying to get money for nothing. Once enough folks get peeved, maybe there'll finally be enough uproar to force an overhaul of our entirely broken patent system. Take it to the supreme court if need be to establish that algorithms are both protected speech and natural discoveries (ie. mathematics, therefore not patentable). Heck, this could even help css-cracking cases if that happened.
I overlooked the obvious typo and replied to keep on topic instead of getting offtopic. Trying to run more red ink than my 4th grade english teacher is not what I wanted to post. Ignoring a typo does not mean I missed it.
The truth shall set you free!
Perhaps something like the way trademarks "lapse" if you don't "defend" them.
I remember comment here explaining why Apple "sics" lawyers on everyone they feel is messing with their trademarks [or was it copyrights? no, trademarks I think...]
Check this article:
7 -0 8-02.pdf
? ti cker=FORG&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=304 336
http://www.forgent.com/company/press_room/AAS_0
Licensing deal with Sony:
http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml
Why there are no GIF files on GNU web pages
Will this be changed to say:
Why there are no JPEG or GIF files on GNU web pages?
I laughed when I saw this, because at a Compaq CETS conference the MS Keynote had a hilarious film with Balmer acting as Chris Farly and they were bashing SUN. I wish I could have gotten a copy of that, it was hilarious.
Dave
This patent boils down to a modification of run length encoding, and a very slight one at that.
1 000040 000400001000000300001
Consider a data stream like
0000000000100000010000001000002000000100000
Ordinary null suppression gives you a code like
R10 L1 R6 L1 R6 L1 R5 L2 R6 L1 R5 L1 R4 L4 R4 L1 R6 L3 R4 L1
Their "invention" is to use a different sort of encoding when a run is followed by the next-most-frequent character:
R10 R6 R6 R'5 L2 R6 R5 R'4 L4 R4 R'6 L3 R4
Note the "L1s" have disappeared, but I've introduced another symbol "R'".
This is a trivial modification, the sort of thing people interested in compression play with all the time (there's something analagous in currently-popular MTF schemes), and almost certainly something that was used before the filing of the patent. Of course, that can be hard to prove.
(all the other stuff with DCTs and the like appears to be DCTs PLUS this one "innovation")
IIRC, the license or royalty fees aren't paid by the end-user, per se. In other words, you aren't going to have the JPEGestapo kicking in your doors because you put some images on your website. Your royalty fees are paid through your purchase of whatever software you used to create the images.
So, if I'm Mr. Penguinshit sitting up late at night coding a website with grainy, poorly-focussed 75-DPI JPEGs of Mrs. Penguinshit in the nude, I'm not concerned because I paid my license fees when I bought a copy of Photoshop.
However, if I'm Bruce Chizen over at Adobe I'm seething pissed because now I have to share my profit margin with a bunch of slacker vampires and their lawyers.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Can DjVu be a replacement for JPEG? The problem is that none of the browsers have support for DjVu images... so it would take some time for the conversion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The technology was patently bollocks, as it were.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
So.. aside from all the legal mumbojumbo, and such that's flying around now, isn't it hard to conceive the idea, that someone now owns all your images? Isn't this along the same idea as someone coming out and saying
"I own a patent on all Forks, and therfore, everyone using a fork owes me a nickel"
Just as an example, forks are so commonly used, who ever has this patent, is going to have a very hard time enforcing their own rights.. i can't see this being any different. But perhaps i just don't get what's going on at all.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here.
It was my understanding that the original JPEG standard (which is some ISO standard?) contains many technologies (Arithmetic coding?) that are patented, and require licensing fees / royalties for their use.
To actually further adoption of JPEG, the Independent JPEG Group was founded, headed by a man named Tom Lane I believe, who I think is now working with the PostgreSQL group. They specified the JFIF file format (which is at the header of all the images we know as 'JPEGs' today - there's a TIFF and SPIFF version of JPEG that nobody uses), which ONLY INCLUDED the technologies that were free to use without licensing / royalties. I've skimmed the JPEG FAQ about this
o/~ Join us now and share the software
The people behind PNG and Ogg Vorbis are well aware that patent law and copyright law are two entirely separate beasts, which is why they did not content themselves with just implementing things on their own. They in fact did exhaustive patent searches to make sure that nothing they did was in conflict with existing patents. In both cases it is likely, though not 100% certain, that they have suceeded. The PNG standard was pored over with a fine-toothed comb by the FSF's lawyers, and so far it appears to be clean, which is about as good as you can reasonably expect. Ogg Vorbis has not only been checked out by a lawyer hired by Ogg, but in fact has been vetted by AOL Time Warner (a corporation that's no stranger to patent law itself) because the current version of Winamp includes support for Ogg, and AOL (which owns Winamp) wanted to be sure that they weren't getting themselves into trouble by doing that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Uh, no, it didn't effect you because you're an *end user*. If you write widely distributed software that reads or writes GIF's, it effects you.
I don't know why everyone gets the impression that patent holders would go after individual users - why bother when there are better and easier targets clearly visible??
The full text of the Patent (US4689672) can be found here. It was filed in 1986.
The Joint Photographic Experts Group Committee published the JPEG standard in 1994. While JPEG files were used prior to the publishing of the standard, it's pretty clear that JPEG images themselves don't count as prior art regarding this patent.
This patent appears to me to cover RLE files (claim 1). This strikes me as likely to have prior art.
This patent appears to me to cover a simlple scheme one step removed from Huffman encoding (claim 6). This also seems likely to have prior art.
If someone can find prior art for claims 1, 6, 13, 25, 30, 36, 38, 39 and 42, the entire patent seems likely to fall apart, since every claim is dependant on those few.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
How generous of them to use so much bandwidth to communicate with us verbally. I'll listen to every word of every audio file on their site to get their side of the story. Just in case they update their audio presentations, I'll be sure to flush my browser cache so I can keep up on the latest and greatest exciting news about Forgent.
goodbye jpg our trusted friend
weve used you for years, maybe nine or ten
you've made porn pics a breeze
pics of doves and pretty trees
pics of hearts and pics of knees
goodbye jpg its hard to try
to find a patent free format that compresses without using pi
now that greed is in the air
licensing fees are everywhere
Corporations killing us, they don't care
we had jpg we had gif we had multi-formats like tiff
but the formats are now owned, our future's just on loan
goodbye JPG please still display for me
I know you are now the black sheep of the format family
you tried to be compliant not wrong
but the lawyers are now licensing you for a song
wonder how i'll get along
goodbye jpg, its hard to die
when all the companies are using you on the fly
now that suing's is in the air
web users everywhere, will see your use go rare
we had jpg we had gif we had multi-formats like tiff
but the formats are now owned, our future's just on loan
goodbye jpg my little one
you showed my pics and helped me get my website done
and every time people came around, you'd be linked with a funny sound,
no better format I have found.
ggoodbye jpg its hard to try
to find a patent free format that compresses without using pi
now that greed is in the air
licensing fees are everywhere
Corporations killing us, they don't care
we had jpg we had gif we had multi-formats like tiff
but the formats are now owned, patenting out our future's just on loan
we had jpg we had gif we had multi-formats like tiff
but the formats are now owned, patenting out our future's just on loan
- Yo Grark
==Next they'll tell me the stuff I create on slashdot is really owned by the telco's for using their equipment==
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
And they have a link for investors right on the press release? Please.
May we never see th
And "IANALY" means I Am Not A Lawyer Yet.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Yeah, and I hate that the restaurants don't let me take off my shoes and eat off the floor.
If you want a proper tea ceremony, I suggest you go to Japan, and be prepared to spend big bucks. Not too many people do it the old-fashioned way any more.
A list of prior art is given in the history paper linked at this website:
http://www.geocities.com/mpegminus/
In any event, JPEG could be tweaked to circumvent this infamous patent by losslessly transcoding the 2D-run-length symbols to something else.
In fact, every JPEG picture in the world could be filtered without altering a single pixel, and would completely avoid this patent.
AUSTIN, Texas, Jul 11, 2002...
Is it really true that every poisonous
snake in the US makes its home in Texas?
As I recall (I was living in the city where this happened at the time, working in a medical capacity), there is more to the "wrong leg cutoff" story.
While I was not involved in his care, I still respect patient confidentiality. It's worth noting however that his disease process WAS NOT cancer. There is way more to this story than you realize.
The "wrong" leg was marked by the nurse, and the surgeon operated on it. The patient, an older gentleman, was interviewed on the local news soon after he awoke from the surgery... . He was not upset... his statement was something to the effect of "oh well, these things happen."
THEN some local attorneys got a hold of him and said "we'll make millions!!" and maybe they did... the final terms of the settlement were never disclosed. However, he will probably get his medical care paid for at that facility for the rest of his life.
Not as cut-and-dried as most media outlets made it out to be, particularly when you know the details. For those of you curious about this case, take heart in the fact that you may not find anything/anyone willing to talk about it... would you want your Mom or Dad's medical details on Slashdot? Most physicians take their confidentiality oath (part of the hippocratic oath) very seriously. Keep in mind that in cases like this, that unless released by the patient, the physician is ethically and legally bound by his confidentiality oath, and cannot even defend himself, while the patient can go on the TV news and say anything he wants...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The majority of web browsers in the wild still don't support PNG correctly (and virtually nothing supports MNG).
Galeon does support MNG, in fact I have one in my personal home page.
I guess other gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Netscape, etc) support MNGs as well.
I don't know whether they support every feature, but animation does work.
If you want browsers to better support PNGs and MNGs, use it in your webpages!
Greetz,
Quique
It sounds like my taking a picture with my digital camera of everyone's favorite finger, touching it up a little in everyone's favorite GPL'd image editor, and emailing it off from a webmail account that they can get shut down with complaints for all I care.
I went to their site and went down the list of company officers and made some guesses at to what their email addresses were likely to be. I avoided any words I thought their IT team might be filtering for the next few days. (Some have already bounced, so it doesn't seem to be first initial and last name.)
Oh, and their email domain is just @forgent.com.
A fund for superhot lawyers for free software. Lets use lawyer clout to get MS off everyones backs - including Lindows. Lets file claims against all these file format patents that have never been enforced until now. I will put my money down for it- if the FSF community- and all its backers could turn up to a court along with funding for superhot lawyers - maybe we can legally outmanouver - and if not - then get even better lawyers... It seems that money has more clout than sense or legality anyway - fine lets pump it into a community kitty - solely owned by no-one - and managed purely by majority vote of FSF users. Maybe we will need to enforce some restriction to stop pro MS people scuppering the democratic process there - like only allowing a linux based client for the voting - and applying some kind of clause that makes it entirely ILLEGAL to run it on a closed source OS.
I know this all sounds far fetched - but we need to watch our backs - it looks like the corp's are lashing out at the moment - terrified that we are shaking their very foundations.
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html
However, I believe QuickTime for Windows/Macintosh will display PNGs. I would expect most Linux/*BSD browsers to just display them natively, though.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
When I was, 4.7 read PNGs fine. I think 4.x does in general actually.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I've been playing with some low-memory browsers on various old computers I've been trying to resurrect and pngs have given me trouble on a couple browsers. Luckily, there are a few small footprint browsers still in development, so with any luck they'll get the kinks out.
Well, as it's only a US Patent it is no harm to open source,
let M$ and other big companies pay, Open Source programs using JPEG will be distributed in the EU for example (as done with encryption stuff).
Even assuming they *do* get their patent claims right, making JPEG YAG (Yet Another GIF), would those same patents hold for the JNG format?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
AIUI, patents expire 17 years after application...no, by http://www.bountyquest.com/patent/patentfacts.htm it's 20 years, including for this one.
/long/ time, 4 years isn't unreasonable. I suppose that the same goes for BT's patent on "hypertext", too.
Which is interesting; I thought they were trying their luck for this one after 16 years because it was about to expire and become worthless anyway. Maybe they still are; lawsuits take a
I don't know if you can launch a lawsuit after a patent expires for an infringement that allegedly took place before the patent expired, but I expect that's a matter of record.
Robert Carnegie, Scotland.
Have a look at it (Warning: french site):
original strip, ogg sound from the image, decoded image from ogg sound
And then, there is the Makefile
Just type: make SRC=nameOfTheImage
Original idea: Vincent Cuzin.
Original strip and web hosting: Benoit Girard.
Makefile: Stephane Gourichon
Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
But what can we actually DO about them? Software patent lawyers are pushing for everything to be patentable, and big corporations are jumping in because their competitors will kill them if they don't. And the both of them have the money to buy their own pet congresscritters to make all this 'legal'. And the rest of us get screwed.
P.S. I'm sure you'd suggest a "patent pool" or something like that. The problem is that the vast majority of us have neither the time nor the money (both for the patent application and the paying of laywers) to try patenting everything.
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
If you feed it a dithered 8bpp image, it will happily store it without any loss whatsoever. The difference you'll see is because you dithered the image before storing it. The GIF format is equally lossless as long as the image is at most 8bpp.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
This makes me want to S*^T
When someone patents a new mechanical device, it is typically a recombination of past devices. That doesn't make their patent invalid, and patents encourage mechanical invention. Successful patents encourage people to look for more solutions, different enough from what was patented to escape the patent, but trying to solve the same problem. Again, we all benefit. Sure, we pay a little more than if it was unpatented, but there is now a motivation for people to try to come up with great ways to do stuff that are not covered by patents. If someone has a legitimate claim to a patent that covers JPEGs, and I am not saying they do, then, of course, they should be raking in the bucks. JPEG format has been extremely useful to all of us. It is reasonable to say that without JPEGs, there would be no web, because the cool thing about browsers was that they let you see pics, as well as text. Plus, the profits in the beginning came mostly from dissemination of pictures, as we all know. ;)
So, why should the company that came up with the technique which made this possible not profit? They should profit. And we should be grateful to them. While some people will hate them forever for charging for stuff that makes our lives better, they have done something wonderful for us all.
Now, as for the legitimacy of their claim, well,
let's just say that if their claim is invalid, then I hope the courts recognize that fact, and quickly.
burn all jpegs
How can somebody have a patent on a standard? This really confuses me. (Of course I'd be lying if I said that law in general DIDN'T confuse me.) Think about it: C is a standard. Bell Labs, AT&T, et al. they didn't patent it (to my knowledge...). And if they did, and tried to collect on it now? It boggles my mind how a standard, which is supposed to be free, and open, and usable by everyone, can be patented. And if it is legal, then why doesn't AT&T clam up, and start pulling in for it's patent on C, (Which I'm sure they could "conveniently" secure). Think how much $$$ they'd pull in! And for that matter, how about Linus? He could "patent" Linux, and start pulling in dough from IBM, and the other companies that have been using Linus's kernel. (Even though that TOTALLY goes against OS, it would be a great "revenge" tactic. I think I'm probably gonna burn in hell for suggesting that, but it seemed funny at the time....)
You might not want coffee that is 180 degrees, but McDonalds sells 1 billions cups a year, so must be someone likes the coffee.
From their own website: Intellectual Property Forgent has intellectual horsepower that sets it apart from the competition. With 32 patents designed to improve the quality of video communications, Forgent continues to lead the industry with technological innovation. Forgent is committed to developing its intellectual property to protect its investment in research and development as well exploring potential revenue streams for its existing patent portfolio. I love this bottom part. "Exploring potential revenue streams for its existing patent portfolio." So basically they are even publically annoucing that they will explore options with current patents to exploit any revenue they can from them.
So who does this *really* effect?
Well http://www.forgentnetworks.com/contact/index.shtml is going to become popular....
All Your JPEGS are belong to us...
One can not patent mathematical formula, but can patent usage of such formula.
So a patent can be "Using wavelet denoising algorithm, for the purpose of...".. Nice that good scientists gave us the alogorithm. NO we make money from applying it.
Greedy dumb lawer/MBA fucks.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Perhaps there should be a mangagement licence scheme - where only those with a mental age of 18 or above can drive a company. Perhaps that will stop all of this "the dog ate my financial records" behavior.
I just patented a new novel hypertext link (through the hard work of British Telcom) to all information regarding jpeg information. Please send me the money my liar wants his cut and he's startin' to irritate me.
Breakfast served all day!
Now this dated file format can be replaced with something better. .jp2 anyone? www.xnview.com if you wanna create some jpeg2000 (and shrink your disk usage)
Three years ago when I was working for Pegasus Imaging, www.jpg.com, I did a study comparing the then emerging wavelet compression to JPEG. At that time using a sample of about 20 stock scanned photography images I found that wavelet was as good as JPEG in about 50% of the images. I.E. same quality, same size. Was within 80% of the size for 30% of the images. I.E. almost but not quite as good. As for 20% of the images wavelet could produce the same quality image with a smaller file size. Basically, wavelet was as good at compressing desktop images as was JPEG.
That particular implementation of wavelet was very fast and could be used for software video compression/decompression.
For that implementation there were plug-in viewers for Internet Explorer and Netscape. There were mature conversion tools, video codecs, and FDA approved medical codecs.
What never existed was a standardized file format like JPEG JFIF. In my opinion, wavelet could easily replace the utility of JPEG without most people even noticing. What doesn't exist is a standardizing committee to stamp its approval.
I should mention that JPEG2000 is wavelet based but is at least 5X slower than current JPEG software.
- Andrew Hudson
1. The link for the JPEG committee .org is in here. They will be collecting pre-patent documents for invalidating it. Feed them prior art. IEEE,SPIE articles, etc. and actual pre-existing s/w and h/w products will be better than patents.
2. If you want a standard unencumbered by patents, *use patents as the source material for your lossy and lossless encoding algorithms*. That is, find 20-year old *expired* patents and use exactly the techniques from the patents. Everything else will be subject to threat from contemporaneously or earlier filed patents.
Well, I hate this crap. If the open source community doesn't rise up and crush this, (which I know they are preparing to do) this only opens the door for more corporations to try and say they have a prior claim to open source formats.
Here's what I propose - A massive donation campaign when the patent protestment occurs, and raise more money then anyone has seen (who wouldn't give for JPEG? I mean, come on). Here's the key difference though - Fuck 'em I say, and fuck 'em hard! This should be an example to other corporations who would try such things. No bullies on this playground dammit.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually make my website for other people to look at.
Just to elaborate on that, MPEG uses three frame types (I, P and B). There is actually another frame type but it's only used in MPEG-4, and not very often.
I-pictures (or I-frames) are similar to JPEG images (as described above).
The other types of pictures (B-pictures and P-pictures) use three steps of compression.
The first step is motion detectction. The compressor looks for blocks of the image that have moved and calculates a motion vector. This is where the MPEG compressors spend most of their time, and it's where good compressors stand apart from bad compressors.
The second step is simply subtracting the real (uncompressed) frame from the frame that was built by moving blocks from the other frame(s) around to match the new one as closely as possible. This is what old animation programs called "creating a delta frame". By itself, delta compression is only efficient if the image is still. Thanks to motion detection, delta can be very efficient even in moving images, as long as the movement is regular (ex., a camera pan).
The third step is compressing the resulting "delta" image. Areas that are continuous (ie, where the blocks haven't moved or have moved in a way that the motion search algorithm was able to match them perfectly to the other frames) will compress a lot, areas that have more information (ie, that moved in an unpredictable way or are completely new) will compress less. Again, this compression uses DCT.
The difference between B- and P-pictures is P-pictures can only be based on previous I- and P-pictures whereas B-pictures can be based on past or future I- and P-pictures. For this reason, the order of frames in the MPEG stream is sometimes not the order they'll play in. For example, consider this sequence of frames:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
And compress them like this:
1I 2B 3B 4P 5B 6B 7I
To be able to uncompress the B-pictures, the MPEG decoder must have all the frames they're based on in memory. So, in the MPEG file, the order of the frames actually looks like this:
1I 4P 2B 3B 7I 5B 6B
To make sure all the necessary frames are available, MPEG streams use something called GOPs (groups of pictures), that are loaded into the decoder's memory before the first frame of the GOP is shown.
B-pictures offer the best compression but they take longer to encode and, if long sequences are used, lower the overall quality. I-pictures are the least compressed, but give you the best quality if you don't limit the bitrate. If you do limit the bitrate, using only I-pictures will produce pretty poor quality, because every frame needs to be encoded from scratch, and the overall compression must increase to "fit" in your limited bitrate.
Usually the best quality is acheived by using 2, 3 or 4 P-pictures for each I-picture and 0, 1 or 2 B-pictures for each P-picture. But this really depends on the type of footage.
MPEG is a great format for distribution and streaming but not so good for editing, since even a simple cut will usually destroy a GOP a force a few frames to be recompressed (losing some quality in the process). If you edit in MPEG, you should use I-pictures only, and a very high bitrate.
RMN
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What the article says is this (my emphasis):
In other words, genes can be patented once they have been isolated.You said this:
This is not true. You don't patent the method for extracting a gene. You patent the isolated gene itself.For the article to say that this is not "anything as it exists in nature" is ridiculous. It's like allowing me to patent gorillas once I have found a way to put them in a zoo.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....