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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."
Look at all the money the .gif royalties made Compuserve...
No, that was UniSys:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
Apple is strangling Firewire adoption (IEEE 1394) with patent royalty fees.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
*snort* what is the sound of millions of people flipping these guys off? Most people ignore the GIF compression threats - now we're supposed to fear for JPG suits?
Nope, they don't care about home user. They DO care about the very large companies that use JPEG compression in thier products, simply because if the patent holds up (I have no idea how valid or invalid it appears to be) those same very large companies will be in hock to the tune of a lot of $$$ to the patent holders.
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
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
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.
No, it was filed in 1986. Therefore it has 20 years from the date of filing or 17 years from the date of issue, whichever is longer. Therefore, the patent would last until 2006.
(* 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.
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
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
You are a sad, sad, person. Microsoft only claimed that they have patents in the area relating to fragment shaders, which in fact they do. They didn't make any threats as far as lawsuits, or in any way try to block to OpenGL ARB from moving forward. What should they have done, said nothing and then brought the issue up 3 years later? Isn't that why we all hate RAMBUS? Microsoft does a lot of questionable things, but you do the Linux/OSS crowd a huge disservice by knocking everything they do without even understanding what is going on. I guess you can't be blamed completely, you're just a Slashdot-sheep parroting what CmdrTaco told you to think...
Misleading examples, anyone?
The judgement in the "coffee case", Liebeck v. McDonald's, followed after over 700 other cases between 1982 and 1992 in which a McDonald's customer was burned by overheated coffee. Coffee is usually served around 140 degrees Fahrenheit; McDonald's was serving it at over 180. A liquid at 180 degrees F. will cause third-degree burns to human skin in between two and seven seconds. (A "third-degree burn" does not refer to the skin being burned away, but to the full thickness of the skin being burnt.) Coffee at 180 degrees is not fit for consumption, as it will severely burn the mouth and throat.
Stella Liebeck did not set out to mooch millions of dollars from McDonald's. She initially wanted a settlement of $20,000 to cover her medical costs -- which included eight days in the hospital and skin-grafting operations. A jury awarded her the $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages -- to punish McDonald's for knowingly continuing to put its customers in harm's way. The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000 despite calling the company "reckless, callous, and willful" in its deliberate risking of customers' well-being in order to save costs.
See the link above for details. If you want to say that our society is too litigious, go ahead -- it is -- but please do not Ms. Liebeck for that. She was the victim of another of our society's problems -- corporations who believe it will be cheaper to pay off (or toss aside) victims of their recklessness rather than do the right thing in the first place.
- The 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...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).
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!
IANAL, but...
This whole thing seems familiar, not just with GIF but with Rambus and the SDRAM/DDR standards.
At the time, one of the writings mentioned a thing called "Equitable Estoppel." My interpretation was that if you had a patent that was becoming an industry standard, you had to begin notification "promptly," and to allow it to become a standard and *then* begin notifying/litigating was legally naughty.
Rambus is still around, though a shadow of their former arrogance. (I understand that the people are still just as arrogant as ever, they just don't get the press.) In some ways, notably submarining and patent-stretching Rambus was worse. But at least once they had stretched their original art to look like it covered SDRAM and got it issued, they were prompt in filing suit.
It looks like this company deserves no less.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
But, that will not save them from having to deal with all of the revenue generated by previous versions of those products over the years. That could potentially be a boatload of cash that these companies will have to fork over because of Forgent's decision to enforce their patent.
Two things could stand in the way of Forgent and the truckloads of cash they are dreaming of:
The gap between the time the patent was granted and the time of enforcement. We are talking about over a decade of time that Forgent, for all practical purposes, chose not to enforce their patent on JPEG encoding. There is a concept of tacit approval that companies such as Adobe could call into play when this goes to court. And since Forgent has stated on their web site that a "national law firm" is involved, you can bet this will go to court... soon.
Extending the concept of tacit approval, the defendants could claim they would not have used the patented technology in their products if they had known the patent would be enforced. The fact that it was not enforced, during a reasonable period of time after the patent was granted, makes this argument a solid one.
Forgent better hope that the national law firm they hired can claim a plausible reason why it took them so long to enforce this patent. If not, then it will likely be thrown out for all products using the JPEG format up until the date that Forgent decided to enforce it. If that happens, then the flow of money from this will be reduced to a trickle of what it could have been.
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.
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.
The JPEG standard wasn't published until 1994. But the JPEG committee was formed in 1985, and it was made up of combined committees from the CCITT and ISO working groups. So it is very possible that they had already come up with this by the time the patent was filed. The technology used in JPEG was generally based on previously published algorithms. I think there's a good chance that there is prior art to invalidate the patent.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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.
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.
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.
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
This patent was filed by Compression Labs. They were members of JPEG from its inception, but were gone by the time I was a member.
My understanding about this, gathered from JPEG members that overlapped with Compression Labs, was that Compression Labs failed to mention that they had filed for a patent that might impact the work of the committee. This was in direct conflict with the rules established by ITU and ISO wrt IP disclosure. They waited until the patent was granted before they informed the committee about it.
Many members at the time felt that Compression Labs had amended their application with information garnered from committee meetings. There was much bad feeling.
Compression Labs announced that they would not attempt to enforce this patent against JPEG applications. They then stopped attending.
This is very similar to RAMBUS's behavior in JEDEC.
This is despicable.
-- hgc
Linux: There is no infringing code.