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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."
... 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...
Well there is precident (gif).
Maybe something of this magnitude can force everyone to reexamine the current patent situation.
Try Unisys not Apple.
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.
No, that was UniSys:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
Apple is strangling Firewire adoption (IEEE 1394) with patent royalty fees.
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.
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.
Here is the Patent text at USPTO.
Actually I believe that it was Compuserve and yes it was GIF. That is the reason that the PNG format (pronounced 'ping') was developed. Besides PNG is technologically superior to GIF. Will it be time to create a patent free alternative to JPEG now?
-- This is not a sig
*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 ...
- 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
No, they're offering Firewire at an extremely reasonable cost to support current and future development of the standard. This is different because JPEG is already set in stone, its not being developed further, so there really is no need to profit from the format itself because the format itself needs no additional development. Its bollocks.
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.
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
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?
Apple is strangling Firewire adoption (IEEE 1394) with patent royalty fees.
Really?
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
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.
Now is the perfect time for us to consider widespread adoption of Zeosync's miraculous 100-to-1 compression technology.
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.
As in: FORGET IT!!!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Anyone who can point out the hypocracy of others deserves it, IMO.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
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 guess now is the time for PNG (and MNG) to really shine.
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
How can a company come in at this late date and declare a patent on jpeg? Isn't there prior art?
Yep - I am starting to feel that there needs to be some sort of regulation that if a patent has been in *widespread* public use after two years and the patent owner has not announced publically that they own a patent covering such technology, then they should be probhibted from suing implementers of the patent. 'Widespread' is is emphasized as the company or individuals should be able to protect their patent if it can be argued that there was a possibility that they didn't realise that anyone was infringing until date x.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I wonder what the Free Software Foundation is going to do about their images now :-/
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Switching to PNG does at first sound like an obvious solution, but it isn't. PNG and JPG are made for different purposes. PNG is a lossless compression while JPG is a lossy compression.
Sometimes you need a lossless compression, and for that purpose PNG usually gives you the smallest file among lossless compressions.
But sometimes you want a lossy compression to be able to get smaller resulting files. I just picked a random JPG file off my harddisk and converted it to PNG. The file grow by a factor nine.
PNG is a good alternative to GIF, bug PNG is not a good alternative to JPG.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
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
Hot coffee, anoyone?
The McDonalds hot coffee incident was much worse than it was played out to the media. McDonalds had been told by many people that their coffee was FAR too hot to be served to people. They consistently kept their coffee 20-30 degrees hotter than everyone else. The woman who had it spilled onto her groin had third degree burns over the majority of her groin. This was not just some case where someone got a little hurt because they spilled hot water on themselves.
Reparations for the ancestors of the slaves?
No one in modern times has ever received money for slave reparations (nor should the in my opinion).
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
This is the oldest myth in the book, and one of the most oft repeated I see. .25 per unit is 'strangling' the adoption rate.
While Apple helped develop the FireWire spec, it doesn't collect all the licensing fees. The licensing fees go to the IEEE1394 consortium (of which Apple's a member) and it's the consortium that decides the division of the licensing monies on a patent-by-patent basis.
Also, I wouldn't say that
(* Is PNG [libpng.org] 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. *)
I thot that PNG was more for line-art type images. JPEG is better for photos where there are a lot of smooth gradiations. PNG would result in a lot of dithering (pixel spots) in your porn for example. The babes would look even skankier with all those pixels on their.....um.....body.
Perhaps there are variations of PNG that I have not heard about.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
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.
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
Hmmm...I thought technically, they were only charging to use the Firewire name...but they aren't even doing that now.
At one point, the chip was like $5 and the licensing of the name was $1.25 a unit. So, $6.25 for a function that most companies charge an extra $200 for sounds entirely reasonable to me.
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.
look at investor relations->News.
also, the article was posted a week ago.
something I noticed from reading it is that it's not patented in satellite broadcasts. Hey, lets all use satellite internet! Or maybe DirecTV, etc. actually uses jpg for transmitting video?
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
I bet that number would raise sharply if he looked in his IE cache. Heh
Switching from GIF to PNG was easy, because except for animation, PNG could do everything GIF could do, but better.
Switching from JPEG/JFIF to PNG is harder, because PNG doesn't have lossy compression (yet?). When you convert your JPEGs to PNGs, the file sizes are going to increase significantly.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
. 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
Maybe it has something to do with quality over quantity, or maybe he's like me and his girlfriend will delete any porn she finds on his machine, making him start over again. i hate when that happens
I am a nobody. Since nobody is perfect, that means that I am perfect.
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....
It would stand a better chance of being Mod'ed up if it was accurate, but the actuality is that the .gif royalties are charged to developers, not users of the end product, and they're paid to Unisys, not CompuServe. I worked at CompuServe during the whole GIF fiasco and it was CompuServe that developed the PNG format in response to Unisys's heavy handed ambush and released it without IP constraints.
That is not correct. 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. Patent law has no such requirement.
Sorry.
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, "
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...
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
According to an article on The Register, Sony has already paid them $15 million for licensing; hopefully this won't set a bad precedent for everyone else giving in to them.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
First of all, IANAL but, I am almost positive that you must try to enforce patent infringement as soon as you realize the infringement has taken place. If you fail to protect your patent, knowing that infringement has occurred, you lose your rights to the patent.
What are they going to say, "Well gee Your Honor, we didn't figure out JPEGs were infringing on our patent until 2002." Yeah, right. I don't think so.
But like I said, IANAL, so maybe I'm wrong.
It must be their JPEG compressed images that are saving their bandwidth... Duh!
only thing i can think of is that occasionally patents take a while to go through, so you really have to look when the patent was filed, not when it was granted.
Fognet sounds appropriate, given the length of that patent, it's unclear origins and it's absurdity.
Friends don't help friends install M$ 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.
Yes burn your JPEG's. The idea is from when Unisys pulled the same license stunt on the GIF format. The revolt is well docummented. Here is a snip I found. .png suffix.
"PNG (Portable Network Graphics format)
In January 1995 Unisys, the company Compuserve contracted to create the GIF format, announced that they would be enforcing the patent on the LZW compression technique the GIF format uses. This means that commercial developers that include the GIF encoding or decoding algorithms have to pay a license fee to Compuserve. This does not concern users of GIFs or non-commercial developers.
However, a number of people banded together and created a completely patent-free graphics format called PNG (pronounced "ping"), the Portable Network Graphics format. PNG is superior to GIF in that it has better compression and supports millions of colours. PNG files end in a
PNG is supported in Netscape 4.03 and above. For more information, try the PNG home page.
"
Do a web search for "Burn your GIF's"
You will find lots of information. It does not refer to burning them onto a CD!
That is why GIF's are so poorly supported and rare nowdays. It looks like JPEG is the next obsoleted format since they did not learn from history they are condemmed to repeat it.
The truth shall set you free!
(* 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.
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.
While PNG is best at line-art, PNG is a loseless format. It will represent your photos perfectly well, slightly better than JPEG in fact. For storing of high quality original images, PNG is superior to JPEG. However, because it is loseless, it will tend to be larger than an equivalent JPEG file, often much larger..
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?
Here's the problem. PNG is a good solution when you want lossless compression, which is (not coincidentally) exactly what GIF did. This matters when you actually care about the numbers in the image, or when you've got certain kinds of content (sharp edges and smooth color gradients in particular). JPEG is appropriate when you have pictures that look more like the real world... lots of variation, certain frequency distributions, tons of detail. The reason it works so well is that it removes information that you-the-user can't see and then does lossless compression on the rest. That is something that PNG doesn't do.
IANAL, but offhand I see two good bets for defeating this patent claim. The first is that it expires in two years: it was granted in 1987. The other is prior art: the original JPEG group was formed in 1985 by combining CCITT and ISO working groups trying to do roughly the same thing. (Source: The History of ISO 10918. I wasn't there; I'd appreciate corrections.) This patent seems to cover most of the components of JPEG and some of MPEG, and I just can't imagine that the JPEG committee hadn't come up with at least some of that by 1987.
That said, I do hack video and image encoders but I'm not a lawyer. I hope to see this claim shot down in flames. Quickly. I'm bothered by the idea that someone could out of the blue come and claim patent rights over my dissertation before I even finish it.
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
Nobody has registered burnalljpgs.com or burnalljpegs.com yet! Quick, snap it up!
What would you use for pictures on that web site though? burnallgifs.com uses jpegs....
Baz
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. .
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
> The woman who had it spilled onto her groin had third degree burns over the majority of her groin.
And because of her stupidity (Remind me - did McDonalds put a gun to her head and tell her to pour it over herself? I thought not.), everyone who gets coffee from McDonalds gets cold coffee (or at least, coffee which becomes undrinkably cold much faster).
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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
sh-2.05a$ whois burnalljpegs.org
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
No match for "BURNALLJPEGS.ORG".
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 04:53:19 EDT
It's still free, so go ahead.
PNGs are comparatively huge, but a Progressive PNG24 that is in the 1.3MB range still loads in about 3 seconds on my system.
It had a sort of "fade in" effect, and I could actually watch the browser rendering alternate lines at different lengths to fill in the image...what exactly it was doing sort of confuses me, but however it did, for a massive file, the transfer time was negligibly more than that of a Jpeg saved in high-quality (about 80%) mode.
As for quality, I (think) PNG is a lossless compression scheme, if it even uses compression, so there should be no technical reasons the images would look worse.
...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); }
You are mixing Trademark law with Patent law. These are two VERY different animals. What you say is true about Trademarks.
Patents may be defended at the owners choice. They don't expire due to lack of use. Trademarks
do if they aren't defended.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
"1. Patent law makes you enforce your patents. If you don't, you lose them."
This is incorrect.
C//
An AC wrote:
> Apple has a similar claim to ideas used within
> PNG's not GIF's.
They have a claim, yes, but they are not pressing it. Seems Apple, out of the goodness of their hearts, these days is a big believer in royalty free web standards (and open standards period). As long as they have a bit of their own proprietary stuff to be special, sell computers, and can crow about how innovative they are, they are quite happy to share some of their stuff.
Furthermore, a big chunk of Apple's customers is the creative folk. This is precisely the group that would be the first (besides Slashdot) to scream bloody murder if Apple tried something like this with a graphics file format. Apple has done the occasional dumb thing, and once nearly killed themselves with their greed and stupidity, but hopefully they are not that stupid.
"What I'm thinking is different from what you are."
Belabera, "Mothra 3" 1998
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.
Ummm, they didn't get a choice about the investing - They were required to sign agreements dissallowing them from selling the company stock that Enron used to set up their pension plan.
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 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...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.
OTOH, wasn't JPEG a format spawned by the Joint Pictures Expert Group, and supposed to be an open format?
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.
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.
You're confusing PNG and GIF. GIF allowed only 8 bpp...that was fine back in 1990 and is still OK for simple computer-generated images, but not so good for color photos. PNG allows at least 24 bpp (maybe more; I haven't checked). GIF and PNG are both lossless, but PNG uses more effective compression. When I converted all of the GIFs on my website to PNG, their size went down a fair bit with no change in the images.
Your pr0n collection saved as PNGs would look fairly decent...it'd just take quite a bit more space than JPEGs. (Converting from JPEG to PNG wouldn't make any sense, though.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
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
So, who implementing libjpeg did the search?
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.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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?
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.
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).
It took a long time to insert clues into Apple but it did eventually happen. And please no "oh Apple is allowed to screw arround and be grasping, the rules don't apply to them'. I have had enough of that type of talk throwing up each time Dufus tries to tell CEOs to be more responsible while telling the press that his corrupt deals at Harken Oil don't count, like his DUI didn't count, draft dogging didn't count etc. There are no special rules for Apple just because only 5% of the population (10% if you count Apple users twice because it takes them twice as long to earn the money for a new machine), does not mean there are special rules for them.
Back to apple. What happened is that Apple offered some fairly reasonable terms on price but the contracts were utterly stupid. Basically they only lasted a short time and allowed Apple to increase the royalties to anything they wanted after that.
The other thing was that the contracts had bizare restrictions on what you could sell firewire stuff for which changed from week to week depending on what the Apple strategy of the month happened to be.
The result was that the hardware vendors told Apple to take a hike and went off to Intel to talk about USB2. After the suits at Apple realized that Firewire was not going to succeed they came up with a bunch of sane contract terms and folk started to do firewire.
During the middle of all this an Adaptec guy I spoke to at lunch moaned to me that they had done a Firewire card 'an nobody wanted to buy it' - reason in that case being they wanted eight hundred bucks for it and it was obvious that the thing would cost about thirty within a year.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
> I, and many other websites (including but not limited to the MAME website) have switched over to PNG long ago
:-)
I switched to PNG long ago, partly due to the Unisys/Compu$serve patent claim, partyl due to the better compression but mostly due to what seems to be better support in browsers for interleaved rendering (I'm aware that not everyone who wants to view my pages has a fast connection). But, for some reason, Slashdot seems to have resisted PNG and stayed with GIF. Ironic that, don't you think?
> Only stone-age browsers cannot view them
Lynx isn't "stone-age" but (last time I looked) couldn't view PNGs
> there is a plugin available for those ancient things
Of course, not all those "ancient things" actually have any support for plugins.
But apart from all this, PNG and JPEG address different needs. JPEG uses a "lossy" compression technique, which basically throws away some information before using more traditional compression techniques. PNG, on the other hand, is lossless - like (e.g.) compress of zip. Which means that the filesizes (and hence storage requirements/transmission times) of PNG compressed images are likely to be considerably higher than JPEG.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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.
This is a good idea, and it has been done before: for trademarks. However, those who make a living on patent-related services will never agree to such a rule (and they control much of the lawmaking in this area, at least in the industrialized world). After all, it's against their business model.
I don't think the Japanease were dropping things like this on Hawaii, but hey I could be wrong :)
The Anti-Blog
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).
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
Wrong, that's trademarks that expire if you don't enforce them. Otherwise the entire GIF fiasco would have been a non-issue.
I wrote: :-(
> partyl due to the better compression
Sorry. That should read "partly due to the better compression than GIF".
And of course, I can't post the corrections to my comment for another two minutes, and can't use Emacs for editing them. Gotta love the user-friendly interface at slashdot
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Which in turn begs the question, if Microsoft were to buy Forgent, since that company is threatening fees on browsers that can display JPGs as well, how would the Slashdot community react?
The parent post though, did raise a good point, in that sense that perhaps this sudden announcement is just a way to prop up the stock price by reminding their investors that they have valuable IP. That link in the article doesn't actually mention any specific companies they're in discussion with, and I'm not hearing any outraged countersuits from digital camera companies yet.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
Actually, that might have been doable while there were a few thousands of patents. Today it's pretty close to impossible within certain fields since the patents are overly broad and you dont know if they apply without getting an actual judgement in court.
Not to mention, a lot of corporations dont want their employees to do patent research (unless they're filing patents themselves); willful infringment (ie: saw that patent, didnt think it applied) puts you in a much worse position in court than infringing without knowing a patent existed at all.
Actually, the best example is land. if you "squat" on someone's land for say, 15 years, it's legally yours. example: if your neighbor and you mow closer to your house than the actual property line, then one random decade you decide to claim that strip back, you're fscked. it's legally his, since you never said anything. this may be a more local application, but it's an example of how some property laws work.
Well, the patent seems to cover the lossless part of JPEG compression. In fact, it appears to cover more or less all lossless compression methods, including Huffman and run-length coding.
Maybe we should switch to an uncompressed image format? ;-(
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."
Scientific American actually has a good article about so-called "submarine" patents. Turns out there are ways to file for a patent and then delay its issuance for years. The details of the patent remain secret until it is issued. When the patent "surfaces" years after it's been filed, anyone who unknowingly used that idea is at the mercy of the patenteer.
An inventor named Lemelson was notorious for doing this sort of thing (see the article). He delayed one patent for 40 years after filing for it. Seems to me like a good (read "underhanded") way to make money off your ideas if you're (a) patient, and (b) too lazy to actually build and sell a product.
My spoon is too big!
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.
What, you don't have a .porn directory?
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
OTOH, wasn't JPEG a format spawned by the Joint Pictures Expert Group, and supposed to be an open format?
So was SDRAM. We all see where that got us.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
> It's only because MSIE *still* hasn't gotten alpha channel / transparency right in their PNG support.
No. Even if MSIE supported PNG properly, it *still* isn't an viable alternative to JPEG for high-resolution photographic images. If you don't believe me, go find your favourite high-resolution image and save it as both a JPEG and a PNG. Look at the resultant filesizes. Filesizes are important if storage is limited (e.g. digital cameras, palm-like devices) and when bandwith it limited (most people still don't have high-speed low-cost internet connections). PNG is a great replacement for GIF, but not for JPEG.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
True only of trademarks.
Contrary to popular belief, copyrights, trademarks, and patents simply do not work the same.
DNA just wants to be free...
if Microsoft were to buy Forgent
I also had that idea.
Microsoft Lawyer: You want us to pay you royalties for using the JPG format in our browser? Run along now before we break out the petty cash, purchase you, and transfer you to somewhere mosquito bites carry fatal diseases.
Forgent Lawyer:Oh shit! We didn't think of that.
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.
Certainly not Liebeck... the linked summary makes it patently clear that she was sitting in the passenger side of a stopped vehicle.
Read again...
They want money also from the Browser vendors (Hi Microsoft, Opera, Netscape, AOL)...
Hetz (Heunique)
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
Consider that - if you screw up and someone dies because of it, you will probably be charged with "negligence causing death" either civilly or criminally. Fines will exceed your net worth, or you may end up in jail for a decade.
If a corporation kills someone out of sloppiness, they lose 0.01% of their net worth in fines. It becomes acceptable losses.
Whoopie.
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
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.
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."
In my experience, for photographic images, jpeg is (on the whole) better, in terms of space taken up. Basically, PNG's should look slightly better, but be much larger. For NON-photographic images (diagrams, things with lots of blocks of solid color, etc. - i.e. stuff that .gif USED to be better for technically, before PNG came out) PNG is MUCH better than jpeg.
This is a purely subjective opinion, though. It would be interesting to see some sort of improved "jpng" or something of the sort developed to supply a patent-unencumbered lossy image compression scheme analogous to .png's lossless one, to combat this ridiculous litigation...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
[expressing my ignorance]
I thought MPEG was a series of JPEGs.
explain?
50,000? You must be new here.
Not counting video I think I have around 17GB.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Isn't this what kicked Rambus in the junk though? Didn't a ruling against them revoke the patent because Rambus let their patent be widely and freely used everywhere (even if it wasn't officially acknowledged) and then sprung fees on the patent user? That was my take anyways.
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.
100:1 says this is a sad attempt to boost the stock so some white-collar criminal can sell quick and get rich before it falls again. I wouldn't bet on the SEC looking into it, either. But you could probably buy the stock, wait for CNN or someone else to pick up on this story, watch it rise, then sell it before people realize that overreaching pipsqueak extortionists have no hope of taking on Sony, Adobe, AOL/TimeWarner, Microsoft, etc with a bogus claim to having "invented" something that's in widespread use and later trying to pull a stickup job on the entire digital economy... nhah ghaanna haaayphen. Why should only company executives get to profit off manipulation of stock? But if I were the legal dept of one of those companies, I'd be writing "fuck off" letters right now.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
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!
Nuggz, you deserve karma just for your choice of title.
Virg
According to The Register, Sony already paid, to the tune of $15 million- Forgent's most recent SEC filing states that Sony Corporation paid the company $15 million for licensing Patent 4,698,672: a significant portion of the $22 million Forgent booked as revenue in the quarter.
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.
(* You're confusing PNG and GIF. GIF allowed only 8 bpp...that was fine back in 1990 and is still OK for simple computer-generated images, but not so good for color photos. PNG allows at least 24 bpp (maybe more; I haven't checked). *)
It is not so much the palette size, but how the compression is done. JPEG uses "waves" for its compression technique. Thus, if you have a gradually-changing area in the image, JPEG will replace it with the formula for a wave or curve. However, palette-based compression, which I think is what PNG is, does not have direct method, and must store each stair step, no matter how gradual.
The formula (approximation) for a gentle hill is more compact than a foot-by-foot elevation map. Thus, with pallette-based compression, you either have to store more data, or descrease the pallette size, resulting in the freckle-look on Debby.
Table-ized A.I.
As did Geoworks with WAP. In the graph of GWRX's stock performance, can you find the point at which the suit was filed?
hint: It's right before the stock skyrocketed from the teens to its all-time high north of $50.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
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.
Sure. Go into the computer business. Manufacture computers with a big red button on the front, which when you press it makes the four sticks of dynamite inside the case explode. When someone sues you for their kid being killed, tell them that they were stupid for pushing big red buttons without knowing what they do.
If McDonald's had been following the established (restaurant) industry practice of serving coffee hot but not hazardously so, Ms. Liebeck putting it between her legs would have been risking stained pants and perhaps an Uncomfortable Crotch Experience. It was McDonald's considered and deliberate choice to continue selling hazardously hot coffee even after having burned 700 people with it that made them liable.
Really? Is it that much more expensive to make a car which won't explode? If customer-hurting companies have to raise their prices in order to pay off damages to the people they've hurt, then their non-hurtful competitors will be able to offer more competitive prices. Hurting your customers will no longer be cheaper.
IF YOU DELIBERATELY, KNOWINGLY PUT PEOPLE IN HARM'S WAY, YES, YOU ARE FUCKING RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT HAPPENS! IT'S REALLY THAT SIMPLE, DUMBASS! IT'S THE SAME AS DRIVING DRUNK! OR TOSSING JARS OF NITROGLYCERINE AT PEOPLE AND SAYING "HERE, CATCH!"
Ahem, pardon me, I got a little carried away there. (I'm not even supposed to be here today...)
Expecting customers to bear the burden of being hurt by products, in order to keep corporate costs down, is absurd. Allowing corporations to blow up, burn, and poison people to save a buck has no place under the rule of law.
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
The analogy is deeply flawed.
Both the former slave owners AND the former slaves are long dead. 100% of the citizens of the US were born after the slaves were freed. A fair portion of descendents of current US citizens had not even immigrated to the US when the slaves were freed.
How is it justifiable to make these people pay reparations (which they would be, since it's _their_ tax money as well)?
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!"
Nope. They both use similar technology (Splitting up the image into small blocks) but MPEG is not a series of JPEGs; it compresses things over time. For example, if a block does not change between two frames, it is only transmitted once. It's a lot more complex than this, and actually very interesting, if you have the inclination to read about it. Ingenious system.
Interestingly enough there is a format called MJPEG which, in fact, IS a series of JPEGs. I have a Miro DC30 capture card that uses MJPEG compression. Since all the frames are easily seperable (unlike MPEG) this format is good for video editing.
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
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!
um, when apple suddenly demanded $1 per port they pretty much kick started USB2.0 and serial ATA and pretty much killed the notion of using 1394 as the HDD interconnect inside a PC. I was working in the PC biz at the time, I remember these things. I also remember the belief that this was a Steve jobs deal to hurt PCs compared to macs. well, he hurt us users.
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?
Start spamming the media relations department...
Forgent Media Relations:
Hedy Baker, 512/437-2789
hedy_baker@forgent.com
Of course this could just be to get some press coverage, cause bad press is better than no press.
AF-Design, web development.
Breakfast served all day!
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
That's quite true; one should make tea with boiling water, unless it is Chinese tea in which case one makes it with water around 180 degrees F. However, one does not serve it to one's guests at that temperature, since it loses some heat while steeping or brewing. One never leaves tea or coffee on a heater for hours, maintaining its temperature at 180 F until the moment of service; the subtle aromatics of either beverage will quickly evaporate, leaving a soulless and bitter brew.
Moreover, in proper society one does not serve tea or coffee in heat-insulating styrofoam cups. One serves both in china, which does retain heat but not quite as well as styrofoam. (It is because china takes on and dissipates some of the heat that teacups have handles whereas foam cups do not.)
One also serves coffee at table in an open cup, so one's guest can add milk or other adulterants. One does not expect one's guest to remove a tightly fitting lid first, nor to perform said operation without the stability and protection of a table. Presenting such a puzzle to one's guest -- especially a puzzle loaded with the gory surprise of a near-boiling liquid within, ready to scald the loser in this hideous parlor-game -- is beyond the pale of hospitality.
Thus, the standards of proper society for the preparation and serving of tea and coffee do not form a defense for McDonald's in this case.
Microsoft then gets ownership of the patent, and charges you a penny per JPG viewed in IE...taken automatically out of your MS-Passport Wallet.
However, if you use the included software to upload MP3's to a regular memory stick as a mounted USB drive, the included player plays MP3's just fine.
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.
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.
This kind of caselaw already exists in respect to Trade mark and service mark litigation. If you do not defend your trade mark, you lose it. I am not sure I would like to see this implemented in the area of patents. A patent is something even a single guy in his basement can file on his invention. If he is forced to defend it everytime it's infringed in order to keep it, then it becomes much more of a burden than it needs to be. Myself and the company I work for are in the process of applying for multiple patents. It has been an educational few weeks. There are huge holes in the patent system in the US and they are being exploited. There isn't much that can be done about it at present. The changes will have to come through the case law of patent litigation or through the glacial slowness of the lawmaking system. Walking Bear
IAANAL (I Am Also Not a Lawyer), but if memory serves, that is true for Copyright, maybe trademark, but patents do not have that restrictiobn
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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
Maybe we should switch to an uncompressed image format? ;-(
In a true "Pointy Haired Boss" tradition, I might say it is not such a bad suggestion...It would serve to suddenly enhance the value of all the fiber we've overbuilt.
cat
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.
What person of any intelligence would put a styrofoam cup full of hot liquid between his or her legs and then remove the plastic lid, the only thing resisting the inward pressure of his or her legs? McDonald's shouldn't be held responsible for customers who are sufficiently stupid as to put themselves in harm's way.
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
you've got it all wrong.
microsoft gets the patent, then charges a penny per JPG viewed in Mozilla. IE remains free.
MORTAR COMBAT!
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....
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.
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...
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.
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.
Consider this: Osama binLaden brings the whole of Saudi Arabia to the United States. In time 300 million children are born in the United States and are indoctrinated to believe that they aren't American. These kids grow up and take over the US Federal Government and repeal the Bill of Rights, imposing Sharia Law in its place. The States of America attempt to revolt, but nobody wants to leave their job because their kids will go hungry, and their boss will fire them. So Sharia law stands. 50 years later when their bosses let them, these people start revolting, but it's too late because the entire legal system of the US has changed without their consent, and without them noticing. This is my understanding of what happened to the native Americans - invaders set laws and they had to follow them. If the Prosecutor dies naturally, the Court case ends and a criminal may go free. So is rampant capitalism an impediment to representative democracy? Hmmmm.... This sounds like a good storyline for a movie.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Only trademarks. Copyright and patents are different although when a judge is involved, as in the DeCSS case, what the law actually says has little to do with it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
Oh please,
You might be able to deal with hot drinks, but the cups at mcdonalds were not.
One of the exhibits that was shown in this case was the lid that was on the cup of coffee. The coffee was so hot that it partially melted the lid , causing it to pop off when the cup was slightly tilted and the coffee spilled on her.
Many people like to point to this case as THE example of why we need tort reform and limits on punitive damages. Usually when I hear that I point to the hospital in florida that amputated the wrong leg of a cancer patient. Of course the other leg still was cancerous so they then had to remove the correct leg. His punitive damages were limited to something outrageous like $40,000.
If we look to a case as a shining example of the need for reform, I hope that we point to this case involving JPEG's.
The legal doctrine is called adverse possession, and there are many requirements, it is almost impossible to successfully make the claim. One requirement (in most states) is that you must openly and notoriously occupy the land for the entire duration (usually 20 years or more). Just moqing a bit over the property line is not enough. And if someone is openly staking a claim to part of your yard for 20 years and you do nothing, I personally think you deserve to lose it.
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?
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?
GIF was palette-based. PNG isn't. It stores the raw image data, whatever they happen to be. (BTW, I just checked the manpage for pnmtopng; it allows up to 16 bits for each component. That works out to 48 bpp for RGB images and 64 bpp for RGBA images.) It wouldn't make sense to use palette-based compression; you would use that to map a limited number of color codes to colors chosen from a larger range, in the way that VGA would let you choose 16 or 256 colors to display from 262144 possible colors.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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.
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
I suppose some people might suggest using this patent against a certain other big, Borg-like corporation that ships millions of JPG-enabled browsers and photo editors, but the patent is so silly that MS's lawyers would (rightly) crush it.
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.
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
fuckin-ay!
it is common courtesy to hand over beverages that are ready to drink, i.e. not dangerous to consume. on the flipside, you don't hand people a warm bottle of beer and tell em to stick it in the freezer, do you?
i was scalded by hot apple cider at a local coffee house in the East Village. Apparently, to heat it up, they were running it through the steamer attachment of their espresso machine. probably was just under the boiling point. my lips and tongue went white (i.e. they were cooked) and shed thick globs of skin over the next days. spent a couple days at the hospital and needed much work -not as bad as the McDonalds lady, and the lady who ran the place was mortified. Her insurance company gladly covered it, plus something for my hassle.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
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.
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.
Bayer AG lost their "Aspirin" trademark because Germany lost World War I. It was taken from them, as part of limitations on Germany's chemical industries.
From the patent summary, it seems to cover the "invention" of removing redundant data and a bunch of other vauge compression concepts. It does NOT specifically mention color-space separation followed by spectral transformation that can be quantied with minimal loss of perceived quality (the real magic of JPEG).
IANAL, but it sure looks like this thing could apply equally well to just about any image compression since it's so vauge.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The problem is that today it's close to impossible to avoid infringing within some fields. Either you do a search, and you come up with several patents that may or may not be remotely related to your product. So, what do you do then? Call the patent owner and ask 'excuse me does your patent cover what we're doing?'. Of course it does. So then you'll have to get the patent overturned. Or you pay patent fees for something which isnt really covering what you're doing. Or you face willful infringement which is going to hurt a possible case later. Any way you do it you lose if you search. And the thing with these patents is you _cant_ design around the blocking patents because they cover doing something _at all_, not the method for doing it. You _cant_ stay out of trouble, and you _are_ going to infringe for any
thing more complicated than 'hello world', depending on how broad patents are allowed to stand in court.
So, the only way you win in this game is if you know nothing and nobody sues you. And if they do call on you and you know nothing you have a better chance of dealing with it then.
Not all lawyers are "evil". It's that 99% of lawyers that ruin it for the other 1%.
cpeterso
...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'd still have voted for a large settlement. Why? To punish McDonald's.
So, because you have objections to other things that McD's might be doing, you're okay with taking any opportunity to punish them?
Thank goodness for peremptory strikes. Our justice system doesn't need people like you on juries.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Try taking an uncompressed image off your hard drive and converting it to JPG and PNG.
THEN compare.
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
The similarity is the use of "DCT"/"iDCT" technology , Discrete Cosine Transform.
The basic similarity between MPEG and JPEG is on MPEG I-frames where the DCT is used which is essentially the same use as JPEG, however...
MPEG is not "A series of JPEG" files because of the other frame types, I-frames are complete data frames, the other two frames rely on data in the I frame. MJPEG is a series of Jpeg files, which is about equal to an MPEG of all I frames.
A few other points: the original lawsuit was only for repaying hospital costs, it was the jury who decided on the multi-million dollar penalty. A big part of the reason why the jury felt this way was probably due to McDonald's defense. One of their claims was that because the woman was really old and would probably be dead in a few years, her body wasn't worth the cost of repairing it. There is a good, relatively balanced account in the Too Much Coffee Man comic book, believe it or not.
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!
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.
Osama binLaden is found in 50 years, then surely he should also be found innocent
You seem to have missed the point. If in 150 years Bin Laden's great grandchildren are found guilty of the WTC attacks, then you can start to compare them.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
> Seems Apple, out of the goodness of their hearts, these days is a big believer in royalty free web standards (and open standards period).
If they're so interested in providing free web standards, why haven't they released Quicktime for Unix yet?
For some reason I feel that Apple is not porting Quicktime to Unix for the same reason Microsoft didn't port Internet Explorer to Linux - to prevent unnecessary encouragment of an alternate platform. If you doubt that big compaines do such things, consider why Microsoft ported IE to Solaris and HP/UX , but not to Linux. I can assure it it wasn't the $50 it would have cost them to recompile on their test Linux box. The reason is that Sun and HP aren't marketing Solaris and HP/UX as replacements for Windows and therefore not a potential threat. Proof that Microsoft is more interested in money than improving the world's overall computing experience.
Am I surprised? Not really. I'm also not surprised that I still can't download Quicktime for Linux. If Real was selling an OS, they'd fail to produce a Linux port of RealOne , just as Apple has failed to produce a Linux port of Quicktime.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
Thou forgot to mention the need to lift the pinky finger whilst slurping thy tea!!!
> 1. Weapons are usually quite harmless to the user. There tends to be a RIGHT end and a WRONG end of a weapon, the danger is when you happen to be on the WRONG side.
Coffee (where this started), is usuall quite harmless to the user. There tends to be a RIGHT way to use it and a WRONG way to use it. Ther danger is when you happen to use it in the WRONG way.
> 2. Fossil fuels are not a corporate product (a).
If we follows this argument to the extreme, NOTHING is a corporate product. But corportations refine fossil fuels into the petrol that I (and, I suspect, you) put in my car. There's a process involved which the corporation adds a cost for.
> 3. That license thing you get before you get in a car, that's kinda meant to show you have the minimum level of skill/ability to drive a car safely
Emphasis on the minimum. I've never seen a driving test (I was a motorcycle instructor for a while when I was at university) that's actually any test of driving ability, they're more like a hoop you have to jump through.
> You'll note that you can't drive a car without the license thingy.
Really? Do you want to think about that for a minute? How do you get a license? You take a test. What do you do on that test? You drive a car. But you haven't got a license yet. How do you prepare for that test? You drive a car - usually marked to indicate the driver is unqualified - but you don't have a license.
Even if you ignore the test element, you can still drive without a license. You might well be breaking the laws in your jurisdiction to do so, but not holding a license does not prevent you from driving a car. Perhaps McDonald's should insist on a "how to drink coffee" test for all its customers, and that the possess a valid coffee drinking licence before they be served?
> 4. Knives - See 1.
Coffee - see 1.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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...
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!
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.
That is not correct. You are thinking of trademark law.
You are wrong - the original poster is correct.
In patent law, there is something known as the doctine of laches. Essentially it states that if a patent holder delays litigation for an unnecessarily long time, they lose the right to sue those who have infringed.
Oh. You're counting video.
:)
I've got three of those 250-CD binders full of DVD rips, courtesy of my good friends at WantedList and some similar services. That's just adult titles, mind you. I'm about two-thirds of the way done with my fourth.
I agree that licensed content is entirely too easy to come by but I have a good time finding stuff from, uh, talented amateurs.
And now that my "ex" has decided she's gay, I even have someone to help me look.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Patents may be defended at the owners choice. They don't expire due to lack of use. Trademarks
do if they aren't defended.
Not exactly. A patent holder can lose the ability to sue infringers if the patent holder takes an unnecessarily long time to bring suit. It's called the doctrine of laches.
OK, clarification is called for. Think that you're a native American Red Indian couple of centuries ago. These British guys land on the beach and say, "Can we stay for a little while please?".
Native Americans being nice people say, "Yeah sure, just don't stay too long".
British stay for a few years, bring hundreds of soldiers. The native Americans get pissed off and say, "Maybe you should go home." The British say, "No asshole," and invade the rest of the country and look for gold whilst killing your people". You swear to your children to take the country back and become an Apache Indian and fight the British/US army. The Boston tea party and the Bill of Rights are irrelevant to your people, it's just the people that invaded your country arguing with each other and trying to stabilise their invasion force by inventing a Bill of Rights and Constitution. What if the Red Indians disagree with a foreign invading power inventing some weird rules that sound good, does that suddenly mean that they've never been invaded?
Suppose Osama binLaden invaded the US and took over Florida. Bush is busy with Enron and so he says, "binLaden you can stay a while but not too long"... In a bearacracy things always get delayed/lost so 50 years later binLaden stands on some fire hydrant and proclaims, "God passes down the Sharia law, all men shall be free, all women shall wear bhurkas" yada yada. Should Bush say, "Yeah, when binLaden came we didn't mind if he stayed a while, but now that he's been here for 50 years, we respect the Bill of Rights and Constitution of the Sharia that he has laid down in that State, and the Federal Government will be governed by those laws." Well this is what we're expecting of the Red Indians if we impose western law upon them.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
"Forgent", as in Forged Entity. Somone has a great sense of humor.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
It doesn't matter if it's the developers or the users who get charged by Unisys; the users will end up paying for it in the end regardless. The developers have to make money, and if they have to pay $X per copy to Unisys, then the customer will have to pay $X per copy to the developer, most likely.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
RollerBlades is a trademark, not a patent. Patent law and trademark law are different.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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.
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.
Do you realize how incredibly stupid this makes you appear in light of your opinion that McD SHOULD be responsible for burning that lady?
Oh, wow. Uh, that remark was in response to the guy that said McD's coffee was too cold now, because of the lawsuit. Since coffee that's too cold isn't going to injure someone (unless it freezes, and slides out of the cup onto their toe), that would make you an idiot. Thanks for playing, Anonymous Coward.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
I know. 128-byte limit for sigs.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
You can config samba so they don't...
...there is no sig...
In order to get around this patent, the FreeType people implemented an auto-hinter that attempts to automatically guess what the information would have been. The fact that this is necessary at all is seriously lame in my books, I'm not sure what Apple would say if FreeType started using the real hinter again, but at the moment the FT people seem to think Apple are holding them up.
Software patents suck. Period.
You mean aside from the fact that 1394 is a really bad way to connect drives right?
Error correction is your friend, 1394 doesn't have any.
It's at the point now where you need to stop and do a patent search during every step of the design phase. Want to add a lowpass filter at this point in the device? Better stop and see if someone's patented that idea. How about some bypass capacitors in this circuit? Better search for that too. It's a comedy.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
...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?
> That is not correct :)
That is correct
> The best example is Kleenex.
I'd have said either Hoover (vacuum cleaner) or Aspirin (pain killer). Interestingly, I don't recall hearing anyone using Kleenex as a generic term (but that may because I don't live in the US).
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
> How did the other folks in the JPEG group not know about this from the beginning? :)
Too many joints?
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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.
(* It stores the raw image data, whatever they happen to be. *)
Well, if you mean loss-less, then it would not take the place of JPEG because it would take up too much space. Huffman compression may reduce the file size some, but I doubt as much as JPEG.
Table-ized A.I.
> 1. Patent law makes you enforce your patents. If you don't, you lose them
No, that's trademarks.
> And Patents don't last that long anyway
I believe it's 20 years. But that's from memory, and this isn't really my field of expertise.
> 2. PNG, anyone?
What about PNG? It's not a replacement for JPEG. PNG is a lossless image format which does more-or-less everything that GIF does (except for mutli-frame images - "animated GIFs".), and most of it better. What it can't do is compete with a lossy compression mechanism like JPEG in reducing the file sizes of large, photographic, images. JPEG works by "losing" details of the stored image, whilst PNG retains the exact image.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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!
That's a good example of a simple, but non-obvious patent. What really gets me upset is the number of obvious patents granted. These people came up with a simple solution, but a solution that countless others did not come up with, even though they were faced with the same problem for as long as we've had diapers. Contrast this with most of the IT crap patents which are more in the line of "We were among the first people to notice a problem to solve and we won the race to the patent office." Patents aren't a reward to the fastest, they're a method of insuring that those who spend significant time or money inventing something aren't ripped off by someone else copying it. If only our Congresscritters would understand this and give the patent orifice the LARTing it deserves.
The US as a superpower should on principle (at least in abhorrence to colonialism) give the native American Indians whatever concessions they want.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
PNG is lossless. It was intended to be lossless. It wouldn't be a suitable replacement for JPEG in all circumstances. It would be a good format for images from your digital camera archived on CD-R (if it supports lossless output). It wouldn't be so good for photos on a website. PNG does use compression (similar to the compression used by gzip, IIRC), but it preserves images 100%.
BTW, there is a lossless mode of compression for JPEG. DCT-based lossy compression is by far the most common JPEG mode, but the IJG software supports lossless JPEG as well. I don't recall offhand what methods of coding it uses, but the last time I tried it, I think it yielded file sizes similar to PNG.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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")
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
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.
>Second, there should be no surprise... COFFEE IS FUCKING HOT. Suprise, you're an idiot.
To each and every one of you morons who claim 'Coffee is hot, get over it', I award one styrofoam container of coffe plasma, server at 2000 degrees c. Hot coffee does not have to be dangerous coffee.
Brad
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
If she had tried to drink the coffee, she would have had 3rd degree burns on her mouth
Have you ever put a cup of REALLY hot coffee to your mouth? I promise you, you'll realise it's that hot BEFORE it touches your lips.
No, I don't think you would know it's "that" hot, where "that" means "capable of destroying all layers of flesh such that skin grafts are required as no regeneration of the damaged tissue is possible". And while you certainly could feel the heat from the coffee, being able to judge where in the 140 to 200 degree range the actual liquid is based on convection through the air is, how shall I put this, unlikey. Yes, you'd know it's "hot", but would you know exactly how? Yeah, right.
Cars are unsafe, but few people expect their tires to undergo sudden and dramatic self-destruction
Perhaps if more people were aware that this can happen, the roads would be safer (and it's not always due to a manufacturing defect).
Oh, please. First, how exactly are you going to be safer knowing this? How can you prepare for suddenly exploding tires? Second, and more importantly, while the event is possible with properly manufactured tires, it is so unlikely that there is little you could possibly gain by being prepared anyway. Oh, and the tires were improperly designed, not manufactured.
And if you don't know whether the gun is loaded, you don't put it in your mouth and pull the trigger.
If you've just purchased a HOT beverage (coffee, for instance), then it is reasonable to expect it to be HOT - and not unreasonable for the vendor to expect you to realise it's HOT. Therefore, you should take the precautions you would normally take with a HOT beverage.
See, here's the whole disconnect with this issue. The negative effect of discharging a gun in your mouth while it is loaded -- getting your head blown off -- is expected. The normal consequence of being insufficiently cautious with coffee -- namely, a burn -- is what is expected. But while there isn't a great range of consequence implied by "getting your head blown off", such is not the case with "a burn". I've drank coffee that was too hot. It hurt, and obviously I was more careful later. But I suffered no lasting damage -- a first degree burn. Most people would not associate it with the kind of burn that leaves lasting damage. I highly doubt that when you envision what would happen if you spilled your coffee mug on yourself, you are envisioning 3rd degree burns.
Are you familiar with 3rd degree burns? Fluid-filled blisters, damage into deep layers of the skin, possibly requiring skin grafts. That's 2nd degree, okay? I doubt when you or anyone thinks of spilling coffee that they image an lengthy hospital stay and skin grafts. So I'd say most people aren't even close to realizing exactly how dangerous this coffee was.
That's the point. It's a matter of degree, and this coffee was way beyond, as the risk of a simple spill was beyond reasonable.
The enemies of Democracy are
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
didnt know that, but I do know that there is some protocol for HDD over 1394, what is is , SBP-2 or something, and I assume that it has its own reliabliloity.
compared to ATA, 1304 would have been good. and if we had had it in everything, from printer to monitor to disk, then the user experience would be a lot better. plus the wiring harness inside a PC is messy and adds cost.
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.
And this changes what? Surely you can't expect anyone distributing computer software to read most of the patents!
No. Not for a few decades at least. The idea now is that if you injure yourself, it's the company's fault for not protecting you from yourself.
when apple suddenly demanded $1 per port they pretty much kick started USB2.0 and serial ATA and pretty much killed the notion of using 1394 as the HDD interconnect inside a PC. [...] Well, he hurt us users.
Nobody forced you to use FireWire. Apple developed it, so they could ask what they wanted. If you disagree, you should use an alternative. Clearly the costs were too high and people did choose alternatives. Apple had to lower their price as the result.
This is one of the rare cases where free market economics actually works. It's an example of patents working properly for a change, because the invention was succesfully 'tranformed' into a product with a price and certain characteristics. You were never forced to use it, but can compare it with competing standards and decide whether the price is worth it.
Of course, it would be different if Apple would first allow you to use FireWire for free and then suddenly ask a lot of money. But they didn't extort you like that, Forgent Networks did.
I also remember the belief that this was a Steve jobs deal to hurt PCs compared to macs.
You are quite paranoid. Did the MPEG group ask too high a royalty on MPEG-4 to hurt someone? No, they represent the people who created the standard and want money for their hard work. Don't use their standard if you don't agree or try to change the rate (like Apple did for MPEG-4, helping users), but stop this nonsense about being hurt.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
This seems to have taken the PNG people by surprise
as well. Here are the specs of their "lossy" format -
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/jng.html
Looks heavily based on JPEG to me. I wonder how this
will affect the MNG image format (of which JNG is
a part)?
Cheers,
Si
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
This is a very interesting link you've provided, thank you, I was looking for something that explained laches more clearly.
As I understand; laches only apply if it can be proven that the rights holder knew of the infringement. Which is different than in trademark law, where the rights holder must "vigoursly defend its rights". In this particular case with JPEG's you are probably right and laches would apply as it was a known standard. However, I don't know how successful this defense has been in the past, the best recent example where I don't even think laches was attempted were the Rambus cases. The patents had been issued around '91, the infringement began occuring in '96, but the suits didn't start till '00. Why didn't laches apply there? I'm just curious if anyone knows...
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.
Like the collapse of BCCI - where did all the money go? Not to the account-holders, but to the corrupt evil receivers who cut deals with BCCI management to get their money.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Now that's value for money because these slaves' children are born into poor areas with no education system and thus they stay slaves and the lucky ones get to work in McDonalds - "everybody is born equal" - yeah whatever. Therefore these kids of slaves can't move into better areas because the only company that would give such uneducated people a job is McDonalds. Then the third generation of slaves is again born into these slave areas with McDonalds being the only job and no education system and high crime. Even the most intelligent people can't learn anything if they don't get an education so they also work in McDonalds, and their kids in turn don't get enough money to go to Harvard or whatever if they get admittance. And so the cycle continues, and this is why the African Americans and their descendants should get repearations until their employment and wealth demographic completely matches that of all other races.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
So this is why Politicians always lie to us, if they told us the tuth we won't understand it, or won't want to understand it *sigh*
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
burn all jpegs
It's a shame, I like firewire and think it should be on everything, but no, we have to worry about usb2 driver support instead.
I don't think that Firewire has lost yet, although it will probably face stiff competition from Serial ATA and USB 2. But I don't see DV camera's using one of these standards.
Doesnt mean I dont recognise attempts to put pcs at a disadvantage w.r.t Macintosh boxes.
That is basically the thing that Apple has to do to keep selling their computers (although they usually do this by improving their offering). But it just doesn't make sense to see the Firewire royalties in this light. Firewire on PC's increases the number of Firewire devices which is better for Apple. Certainly when they have the best video-editing software around (Final Cut Pro & iMovie).
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
would those same patents hold for the JNG format?
Yes, they would hold for JNG's image compression method 8 (JPEG)
which is the only one defined right now, and alpha compression
method 8 (JPEG) which is one alternative (method 0, PNG IDAT, being
the other). If push comes to shove we could define a different
method, but someone would have to invent that different method
and make it available royalty-free.
Glenn
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)>_<^>
Wavelet compression, when you boil down the math, is solving a least-squares problem
Huh? Wavelet compression is applying a multi-scale threshhold filter. It happens to filter out gaussian noise, preserving "edges".. but it is not a least-square problem in its core.. IIRC, and I think I do..
<^>_<(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.
Well- I learned something new today. Thank you.
On the other hand, according to the writeup you
pointed us too, the doctrine of laches isn't a
complete defense! Basically, it can be used to
defend against the possiblity of a patentee going
after previous earnings, but cannot be used to
defend against going after future earnings if
the infringing party doesn't cease from violating
the patent after the lawsuit is engaged.
Consequently - it's fair to say that a patent doesn't
really loose it's force until it expires. Trademarks
can loose their protection of not vigorously
defended constantly from my understanding.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Breakfast served all day!
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
~~~
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....