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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."
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 ...
*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?
Nope, they don't care about home user. They DO care about the very large companies that use JPEG compression in thier products, simply because if the patent holds up (I have no idea how valid or invalid it appears to be) those same very large companies will be in hock to the tune of a lot of $$$ to the patent holders.
You are a sad, sad, person. Microsoft only claimed that they have patents in the area relating to fragment shaders, which in fact they do. They didn't make any threats as far as lawsuits, or in any way try to block to OpenGL ARB from moving forward. What should they have done, said nothing and then brought the issue up 3 years later? Isn't that why we all hate RAMBUS? Microsoft does a lot of questionable things, but you do the Linux/OSS crowd a huge disservice by knocking everything they do without even understanding what is going on. I guess you can't be blamed completely, you're just a Slashdot-sheep parroting what CmdrTaco told you to think...
Misleading examples, anyone?
The judgement in the "coffee case", Liebeck v. McDonald's, followed after over 700 other cases between 1982 and 1992 in which a McDonald's customer was burned by overheated coffee. Coffee is usually served around 140 degrees Fahrenheit; McDonald's was serving it at over 180. A liquid at 180 degrees F. will cause third-degree burns to human skin in between two and seven seconds. (A "third-degree burn" does not refer to the skin being burned away, but to the full thickness of the skin being burnt.) Coffee at 180 degrees is not fit for consumption, as it will severely burn the mouth and throat.
Stella Liebeck did not set out to mooch millions of dollars from McDonald's. She initially wanted a settlement of $20,000 to cover her medical costs -- which included eight days in the hospital and skin-grafting operations. A jury awarded her the $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages -- to punish McDonald's for knowingly continuing to put its customers in harm's way. The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000 despite calling the company "reckless, callous, and willful" in its deliberate risking of customers' well-being in order to save costs.
See the link above for details. If you want to say that our society is too litigious, go ahead -- it is -- but please do not Ms. Liebeck for that. She was the victim of another of our society's problems -- corporations who believe it will be cheaper to pay off (or toss aside) victims of their recklessness rather than do the right thing in the first place.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Now, if you're on any kind of broadband connection, that point becomes pretty moot since the difference between downloading a 10k jpeg and a 100k PNG is less than a second.
Gee, it shows you're not running a server.
Saving 90% bandwidth is a god-given when you do.
The claims made by Ogg Vorbis (i.e. it is patent free) are extremely unlikely to be true.
Well, they have done what they can to make it more likely. Specifically, they have a staff of lawyers scrutinizing everything they do, specifically to make sure they don't run afoul of any patents. They would have been done by now if it weren't for the care they are taking about patents.
It's ironic: patents are supposed to spur innovation onward, but at the moment patents are a huge drag on the development of new software. If you want to make sure you don't get bitten by any patents, you need to go to a great deal of effort.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely