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."

Comments

Not reading the article, eh?

[cduffy]

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.

Re:The role of standards bodies

[dvdeug]

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.

Re:Good!

[ukryule]

The idea is just silly. Makes me want to go patent the Redbook standard and sue the RIAA.

Funny you should mention that ... the CD Specification is stuffed full of patents (mainly from Philips & Sony) which are due to expire in a year or so. I doubt you'll notice the couple of cent drop in price of a CD due to not having to pay the patent holders when they do expire though :-)

The only recent time Philips has got upset with the RIAA was when they weren't sticking to the Redbook standard!

Re:It'll Expire Next Year

[tlambert]

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

Nope

[spacefrog]

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.

Re:Nope

[markmoss]

As far as I can tell, Forgent is not a member of the JPEG organization

The last time Forgent's patent (actually Concurrent Labs) was discussed, one poster said that he had been involved with JPEG, and Concurrent Labs was a member in 1992-95 (IIRC). This patent was granted several years before CL joined JPEG. All the members, including CL, signed agreements to reveal all patents and applications related to the standards under discussion. CL never brought up this patent. This means one of three things:

1) CL was in breach of their contract with the JPEG organization.

2) CL reviewed this patent vs. JPEG's compression methods and decided it did not cover JPEG, so it didn't have to be brought up.

3) The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing - that is, their still-picture people on the JPEG project didn't even know about the video compression patent.

When Forgent bought CL, they bought up their liabilities along with their assets. So they had better be arguing #3, because #2 is an admission that their suit is groundless as far as anything in the JPEG standard before 1995 goes, while with #1 JPEG can sue to be "made whole" by requiring Forgent to license it's patent(s) for free for JPEG applications. And I doubt that CL was ever big enough to make #3 very believable...