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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."
The idea is just silly. Makes me want to go patent the Redbook standard and sue the RIAA.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
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.
Ahh, time to bust out with my prOn collection. As every /. reader knows the prOn industry has been at the bleeding edge of technology. :)
Im sure some one has an image that can show prior art.
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
"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."
I'm not sure I'd even praise the JPEG group for taking swift action - I'd say they're doing what's necessary to combat Forgent's crime. Doing their job as a standards body like an officer does his job as a member of the police. Read that press release again, and try not to grit your teeth.
If you want my opinion (and I'm sure you don't), a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted - for a calculated conspiracy to defraud the general public and standards bodies.
... the Porn Industry is expected to hit a recession... heh :)
"Derp de derp."
The JPEG Committee had to do this. So what if there is a new standard? Without securing the old one, who would adopt the new one.
They could say two things:
1) We've got a new standard. Just move every image on the web to it.
2) This is absurd. We're going to fight this, but if all else fails, slowly adapt the new standard.
At least now, with option number two, they maintain credibility, as they don't have unreasonable expectations.
Also, a bit off-topic, but is there any real competition for a web photo-quality image format? PNG is an obvious GIF killer and is slightly entrenched (IE, has browser support), but JPEG2000 isn't as far as I know.
Their patent describes a technique for digital video compression that uses some of the same mathematical techniques as JPEG, only their method requires more than one frame to be present to offer any significant compression (so I have been told).
If that is true, that alone should be enough to tell Forgent to piss off.
IANAL
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I know that in trademark law, if a company fails to vigorously enforce a trademark they lose claim to it. The effect of this is McDonald's sometimes sues a little family restarant called McDonald's and other strange insane lawsuits.
Does this same thing not apply to patent law at all? A company has a patent, allows it to be deluted, and then goes after everybody. In trademark law, this would be thrown out of court.
Now you could say "Trademarks and Patents are two different things" but they are really aren't. And so I'd like a laywer to explain to me WTF gives companies the right to broadside tech firms every few months with bullshit patent claims.
So.. If they want prior art that pre-dates the patent in question, all we need to do is find, lurking in some deep and dark corner of the internet, some REALLY old JPEG compressed image, most likely pornography.
Course, to prove that this file really was old, we'd have to find the subject and maybe pose them the same way to show it's the same person, and then.. uhh.. no, wait.. old person porn.. Eww!
Please disregard!
*opens wallet, prepares to just pay the stupid royalties*
-Matt
1) Patent 4,698,672 can be searched for at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm. The URL is too long to paste here.
2) The jpeg.org page seems to indicate that the patent only affects the baseline implementation of JPEG. If this is true, then it should be possible to write a new baseline implementation that doesn't infringe on the patent.
3) I'm curious what prior art will show up. In 1986, many people were still using BSAVE/BLOAD to store images.
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
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
There is no way they are going to go trawling through archived usenet postings/search the web for detailled date-stamped documentation for every case. They *need* an easy way to search for something to compare the proposal against. I'm not suggesting that the time/patent is decreased - simply that the patent agent has more powerful tools to prove the (in)validity of a patent in that time. That has got to be a good thing.
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.
"a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted"
I agree. If it's not illegal yet, it should be. It doesn't even matter whether or not this particular patent is applicable to JPEG, this is yet another case of abuse of the patent law to do things that the law was not intended for. A big part of the problem is that fighting this nonsense required ridiculous amounts of time and money, making it really effective for the "plaintiff" even if they are not holding a valid and applicable patent. And that is just sad.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
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?
I used to write software for a very large corporation. We were frequently encouraged to file patents for anything that we invented. We were rewarded even if our patent application was rejected. A successful patent application was a big deal. The corporation was quite sensibly trying to build up its portfolio of patents.
Eventually, you may have to work for some big corporation to write software. Only someone with a big software patent portfolio will be in a position to cross license with the other big players and thereby receive legal permission to use a basic set of key patents. I expressed this concern to a lawyer at Unisys, and his response was basically 'So what?'. He said that he thought that this had already happened in the chemical industry.
I guess that I was something of a crackpot to voice these views inside the big corporation where I worked. It was very encouraging to find out that the folks at the League for Programming Freedom(http://lpf.ai.mit.edu) share my reservations about software patents.
Hire Google to overhaul the USPTO prior art database.
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.
The fundamental problem is that patent examiners look primarily at the database of existing patents. There is no way that someone who is not actually working in an industry could be expected to keep up with all the relevant publications and products, so they have to depend on what has been indexed into a database - and for most technology, the patent database is fairly inclusive. This doesn't work for software; many basic algorithms were developed before software could be patented, also many programmers are rather anti-IP and would rather place their new algorithms in the public domain by simply making them public. (It is of course quite possible to get a patent and make it public domain - the USPTO even has a special patent form for this - but few people want to go throught the paperwork.)
This works legally, but not practically; because the patent office is unaware of what is not in their database, they are quite likely to grant a patent on ideas which an expert _working_ in the field would recognize as not new. Most notoriously, the Australian patent office granted a patent on the wheel; yep, there have been no prior patents on the wheel, even though there's 5,000 years of prior art. I am not sure if that patent examiner was remarkably stupid or went along with the joke, but fields where the existing technology is less well known (image compression software, for instance), it will certainly always be possible to slide public domain ideas by the examiners as long as they do not have a database of public ideas that is as well indexed as their patent database.
Of course, if there was prior art, you can always go to court and invalidate a patent. The problem is that once the PO signed off on it, the courts consider the patent valid until proved otherwise. If you have unquestionable evidence of prior art (e.g., the patent description is copied right out of Knuth), it's still very expensive and takes years to get to present it in court. If the equivalence between the prior art and the patent claims is murky - and it usually is, because people filing questionable patents never use the normal industry terms to describe their "invention" - it's going to be a long, expensive court case, with the outcome depending on whether the judge and jury manage to comprehend the issues. Or it might be quite difficult to prove that the shareware source code you are presenting as prior art actually dates from 1980. And after you go through all this and win, in the US usually you can't get your legal costs back from the company asserting the bogus patent.
You can recover your costs and more if you can prove it was truly fraudulently filed - but that's one reason the filers use odd jargon, so at worst they can claim they invented the algorithm independently and never saw the writeup of it in "Proceedings of the ACM".
The "odd jargon" issue will limit the usefulness of database searches, but still there is a much better chance of finding non-patented prior art if the examiner has a database of non-patented art to search than if he only searches the patents... If a patent has to be taken to court, a database of public domain source code and algorithms would make it easier to find the prior art, provide proof of the original date, and make it more difficult to file and assert bogus patents without being found liable for fraud.
Given the patent office's recent record of errors exceeding even the norm for government agencies, I would recommend a different approach. Reduce the role of the patent office from approving patents to merely recording patent forms in a public database; putting the forms in the database does not imply that it's a good patent. This database will include both patents and public-domain ideas. Patents require a filing fee sufficient to cover the PO's expenses, but there is no fee to post an idea to be free to the public (if it doesn't infringe on prior patents).
Along with the forms and filing fee, the inventor has to send a $20,000 bond to pay off anyone who successfully challenges the patent within the first three years. As soon as the forms are posted to the database, the inventor or agents can start asking anyone else using the idea to stop or pay royalties. But anyone can also challenge the patent, whether or not they are in infringement.
And we need a special, technologically sophisticated, court to rule on patent issues. That is, you need judges with degrees in engineering or science as well as in law. The initial challenge requires a brief summary hearing before a judge, with an informal presentation of evidence. (Brief and informal so that $20K bond will be sufficient.) If the patent is less than 3 years old and has not been previously upheld by a court, there is a presumption _against_ the patent - that is, the inventor must present a preponderance of evidence to uphold the patent. If the inventor withdraws the patent or the judge rules against the patent at this point, the challenger gets reasonable and necessary expenses plus a $5K profit, or $10K if the prior art was in the database before the patent was filed. The inventor does have a motive to withdraw if he's likely to lose, because the longer the proceedings go on, the more he'll pay. If the challenger loses, he does not have to pay the inventor's expenses; defending the patent once at a summary judgement is just a normal expense of getting the patent.
All prior art presented to the court goes into the patent and public ideas database. If the patent is invalidated, it stays in the database - marked as invalid, with the court ruling given, and so anything in it that wasn't in a prior patent becomes public-domain.
The loser in the summary judgement can request another hearing before a 3-judge panel, or request a full jury trial - but in either case he has to pay the court costs and the other side's expenses until the final judgement. In jury trials, the jury pool will be working scientists and engineers, and be paid appropriately, so this gets rather expensive... The court will have to power to assess costs and the winner's legal expenses against the loser, and to fine either party if egregious behavior such as knowingly filing falsely is revealed during the trial.