Slashdot Mirror
JPEG Committee On The Ball, Seeks Prior Art
Sangui5 writes: "It seems as if the JPEG Committee has noticed the recent patent fuss, and is working on the prior art angle. Good to know that even though there's a new standard, the committee is standing by their previous work."
According to the article, JPEG 2000 has had extensive work done to obtain royalty-free licensing. In general, it is thus implied that the JPEG committee believes JPEG 2000 to be unaffected by the patent claims which allegedly restrict the existing JPEG standard.
At least the first group Forget (intentionally misspelled) contacted wasn't the developers of The Gimp or something.
Why would they? When you're doing something like this, open source people don't have cash to pony up, and help keep people dependent on the technology in question.
It's actually a 2-dimensional DCT (discrete cosine transform), some quantization applied inequally (the low-frequency components are better represented; this is the lossy part), and then entropy-coded (Huffman or arithmetic, aka zip-like lossless compression) in a cool zig-zag fashion. Here's a quick, decent summary.
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To see why, consider the standard process for creating a patent in a large company:
- You write up an overview of the patent, and submit it. Presumably you know your field, so the first 'prior art filter' is you - have you heard of anything similar?
- You hand it over to your companies patent agent. (S)he will probably be assigned to a particular field (e.g. 'audio/video/image processing'), so understands the area, but is not going to be an expert.
- The patent agent reads through your explanation and does a prior art search - and returns to you a selection of things that may be relevant.
- You explain how your invention is novel compared to these. If you convince him, then the wheels are set in motion, and your company (eventually) submits a patent application.
- The Patent Office reads it and searches for prior art. If they find none, your patent is granted, while if they find something, then it is up to you/your company to dispute their findings.
So, in steps 3 & 5 you have legal experts who understand the area, but are probably not technically expert in the exact field of the patent who have a responsibility to search for prior art. They are also under time pressure, as they have loads of proposals to deal with. So what they do is pull out a few relevant keywords from the proposal and search on them in some prior-art database.The most obvious (and easy) database is the existing patents DB. Now, I'm sure they have other databases they use, but whenever I've been through the process, nearly all the potential prior art which has been returned to me via the patent agent has been previously published patents. So if an idea hasn't been patented before, then it's got a good chance of getting accepted as a new patent.
So if the JPEG group build an extensive, easily searchable catalogue of prior art (with times, keywords, etc.), then it will make the patent agents life a lot easier, thus increasing the quality of patents.
The only recent time Philips has got upset with the RIAA was when they weren't sticking to the Redbook standard!
Actually, it'll expire 17 years from date of issue, since it is grandfathered as a submerged patent filing. In other words, it's governed by the old rules because it was filed under the old rules.
Patents files on or after June 8 1995 are 20 years from date of filing; before that, patents were from date of issue, not of filing, and their term was 7 or 14 years, and grew to 17. One of the reasons for the change to a 20 year term was the move to date of filing as the baseline date.
Either way, it's too damn long a period for this industry.
-- Terry
Although it does smell a bit like Rambus, the situations aren't really similar at all.
The big difference here is that Rambus was a member of the standards body in question (JEDEC). The agreement they signed to become a member of this standards body obligated them to disclose patents. They didn't and thus violated a contract.
As far as I can tell, Forgent is not a member of the JPEG organization, nor did they ever propose to the JPEG body that they adopt their IP as a standard.
The two situations may look similar on the surface, but that is where the similarities end.
which are owned by companies that take part in JPEG.[1]
And mentions some nice licensing guidelines: But earlier on Slashdot in Slashback: Alternatives, Ads, Apple A discussion regarding the licensing scheme to Jpeg2000 pointed to it (the license) being open. Can anyone verify that Jpeg2000 has an unencumbering license?
Perhaps a closer analogy is Unisys. For many years, GIF files were the thing to use. They were popular on Compuserve, then on local BBSes, and along with JPEG, became the image file format of choice on the web. After all of that, Unisys decided to take advantage over their LZW patent, and require a small royalty for any applications that used GIFs.
It wasn't too much later that slashdot came around and posted a link to http://burnallgifs.org/. I wonder how long it will be until they post a link to http://burnalljpegs.org/.
If Phillips no longer holds a patent, what (monetary) incentive do they have in trying to force record companies to adhere to the CD standard instead of corrupting it with their wacky, hopeless "protection" schemes?
Whether Phillips holds a patent or not is irrelevant.
The reason Phillips (rightly) got upset is because the offending companies were still using the CD-logo, which is trademarked by Phillips.
Trademarks don't expire, as long as the company that holds them continues to pay for and police them.
You are 100% correct. They obtain an intermediate image between (delta between two different frames after motion compensation). Then, the DCT is applied to this delta, quantized, and the coefficients are encoded.
The steps applied to the delta are the core of the JPEG compression. However, they are not mentioned in the list of claims in the patent! Further, the patent itself points out prior art on the use of DCT quantization.
Basically, there is no way for this claim to stand, especially when it affects far too many people with deep pockets (possibly more important than the technical points).