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ISO Could Withdraw JPEG Standard
McSpew writes "According to The Register, the ISO is prepared to withdraw JPEG as a standard if Forgent Networks continues to assert its patent claims over JPEG's compression algorithm." I'm sure the JPEG committee would still be happy to hear of prior art.
They could get additional claims covering any patentable material in the "body" (specification) section of the patent, through a "continuation" application, but the 17-years-from-issuance expiration term applies -- counting from the issuance of the initial patent.
That's already there. The law on patents is that if you don't act to enforce the patent for a sufficient period of time, the patent becomes unenforceable. The problem is, you still have to let the patent-holder take you to court and have the judge rule that the patent hasn't been enforced and is unenforceable. What we need is a way to short-circuit that, a set of conditions that a user of a technology can satisfy that guarantee no case can be brought against them.
People always mention the move to PNG as a solution to the JPEG patent problem. PNGs and JPEGs are targeted at different uses. PNGs are lossLESS, JPEGs are lossY. Take a photograph of a forest scene, save it at a PNG then convert it to a JPEG, look at the file sizes. Even a 90% quality JPEG is going to be smaller. But the PNG image is the one you are going to want to do your editing work on as repeat saves are not going to degrade the quality. But a 1600x1200 PNG with lots of small details will run around 1 MB, not something you want to have 100s of in your online photo collection.
This patent was filed under the old rules, which still apply to old patents. 17 years after filing is correct.
Lots of technical and environmental problems are solved by the application of vast amounts of nuclear power
They're not claiming ownership of all of JPEG.
They're claiming that the lossless table-based huffman coding that JPEG does *after* the DCT and quantization steps is covered by their lossless table-based huffman/RLE coding.
Not that this makes their claim valid--there is likely prior art for such use of Huffman codes, and the original patent holder was a member of JPEG in the late 80's, and therefore obligated to mention their patent then.
Please stop saying that the patent has nothing to do with JPEG. If rather than reading the crappy html claims, you read the full TIFF version, it becomes clear that their patent is somewhat relevant to JPEG. The more interesting stuff in the patent isn't applicable to JPEG, but the lossless transform they use is.
That's correct for newer patents--utility patents expire 20 years from the date of the patent application.
Under the older system, however, patents expired 17 years from the date the patent was granted. ISTR that expiry of the JPEG "patent" is covered under that system, rather than the newer one.
What nonsense:
First, PNG is no alternative for JPEG since JPEG, being lossy, compresses much better (which is needed for certain applications such as photography).
Second, you cannot expect the whole world to switch away from very widely used protocols/standards each time some company claims to hold some patent.
If anything, this issue shows how bad, dangerous, damaging software patents are. They cause lots of economic damage, and could lead to illogical behaviour (it is illogical to launch an enormous migration effort for such reasons) wasting lots of money and human resources. It is very good that ISO makes a point here. That has nothing to do with a so called slashdot mentality (as if ISO would suffer from such).
I think Forgent better be very careful about trying to enforce its so-called patents on the JPEG compression standard.
They run the risk of running afoul of US antitrust laws. In the famous US v. United Shoe Manufacturing Company case (1941), the courts ruled that patents cannot be used to stifle competition--of which the Forgent patent may just do. This is the same issue that resulted in Rambus running afoul of the law because Rambus was using its patents on DDR-SDRAM to stifle DDR-SDRAM in favor of RDRAM technology.
Am I the only one who thinks the ISO should stand up and fight the good fight?
It isn't in any way ISO's job to fight patents.
The JPEG people (remember, JPEG is the Joint Photograpphic Experts Group, not just a compression standard) are the ones who will fight the good fight--them and their members. JPEG itself can only do inexpensive things, and probably couldn't force a lawsuit even if they had the money. What they can do is organize their members (who do have money) into working together in the pursuit of evidence that the patent claims are invalid. which is what they are doing .
What about patents not applying if the implementation is open source and not-for-profit?
There is a relatively new area of law, equitable estopple (spelling? eh, IANAL, so don't need to write it), which covers this. In this situation it more or less says that given that the owners of the patent knew (or should have known) that their tech was being incorporated into a free standard, they should have spoken up then, and can't now. Letting someone incorporate your IP into a standard, and letting them believe that they hadn't, is a no-no. Refusing to let them use it is OK, but you have to speak up quickly.
Additionally, there is the defense of laches, which more generally covers not enforcing a patent for a long time. If, given you had been reasonably diligent, you would have been aware of infringement (or you actually were aware), and you do nothing for a long time (6 years is the standard, more or less by situation), then you forfeit your enforcement rights for past infringement. A quote I saw on it went like "Those who sleep on their rights can't expect to exercise them."
The laches defense, applicable where the patent holder didn't defend against a known infringer, only applies to specific infringers that can prove that the patent holder knew about their specific case of infringement. It doesn't help other infringers that can't prove that the patent holder knew about them. Also, the patent holder has 6 years to take action against an infringer that they know about, before laches takes effect.
They do not, however, fabricate news. When they report on rumors and venture forth theories and conjecture, they phrase it clearly as such. That places them quite a bit ahead of other tech news sources such as CNet and ZD. They also have the very good online journalistic habit of quoting or linking to the entire original source without editing it down. While editing down the original makes sense for a print publication, online publications have no real reason to.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Two examples, maybe useful?
The data stream coming out of the DAC in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging device is almost always run through an FFT, then compressed using a simple Huffman or similar Run Length Encoding scheme.
I have some 2 Dimentional FFT's of images and filters from the 1980s. I tarred them, ran solaris "compress." They are on a mag tape sitting in an attic in Wisconsin.
Debian has a bug filed against libjpeg62. It sounds like libjpeg62 has to go to non-US if the patent holds.
--TK
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
Well that may be true, however having had experience of this type of blood sucking weasel facts of that sort do not necessarily do you any good.
Entrust spent $2 million defeating an absolutely crap patent claim by surety. It was so bogus that the prior art for the claim existed in a 1978 MIT Masters Thesis that is extensively referenced (the thesis is credited with inventing the term digital certificate). However it cost Entrust something like $2 million to defend the claim (and Surety paid a similar amount).
The underlying problem here is that not only does the US have a corrupt patent system, but the legal system allows spurious claims to be made that cost imense amounts to defend without risk to the party making the claim.
Nodoby would litigate this type of claim in Europe because the most likely outcome would be that the plaintif would end up paying the costs of the case.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
OK, I'll take the bait, since I'm qualified to respond. I'm credited on the PNG specification as a contributor, and I wrote one of the first (if not the first) commercial implementations of PNG, for a little company called Mastersoft that eventually got acquired by Adobe (via Frame Technologies). Your facts are half-right -- PNG does give better image quality by virtue of supporting up to 16 bits per channel (16 bits each of R, G, B, and optionally A), and by virtue of using lossless compression, but it does not give better compression in the general case.
JPEG is designed to use lossy compression, and as such, it can attain much tighter compression ratios than PNG can. In some cases, PNG can generate a smaller file than JPEG, but this is a corner case where the original image has a limited color space (e.g., uses indexed color with very few unique colors), and where the original image has abrupt transitions (e.g., line art, or art where regions are solidly colored). JPEG is designed to work well on photographic images, where continuous tones are the norm.
If we lose JPEG as an open standard, there isn't anything left to adequately replace it. PNG was supposed to replace GIF to get around the Unisys patent (GIF tax). JPEG2000 is too new, and there are too few software packages supporting it. JPEG2000 also requires the use of wavelets, and a lot of legacy hardware might be severely taxed processing these new images.
TIMELINE
1986 - Patent filed, Oct 27, Compression Labs, Inc., San Jose, CA
1987 - Patent granted, Oct 6
1992 - JPEG standardized ITU-T Rec. T.81 (1992)
1994 - JPEG standardized ISO/IEC 10918-1:1994
1994 - GATT ammended ("Ururguay Round"), Dec 9
1995 - GATT changes to U.S. patent law go into effect, Jun 7
1997 - Patent acquired by Forgent Networks
2002 - Patent enforced by Forgent Networks
INFORMATION
People have criticised Forgent Networks for not speaking up about the patent during participation in ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Sub Committee 29, Working Group 1. In fact, Forgent did not have the patent at the time.
The patent was granted prior to the GATT-mandated U.S. patent law changes to eliminate submerged patents. Thus the term of the patent is 17 years; therefore the patent expires on Oct 6, 2004, not "in 2006, 20 years from the filing date", as people have been claiming.
It is not the proper role of the ISO to take up a legal battle against patents.
CONCLUSIONS
Forgent was probably unaware of the patent at the time of its participation in the JPEG working group.
Prosecuting the patent after allowing the continued existance for 5 years of an international standard based on the patent is likely a violation of the RICO statutes.
Specifically, USC Title 18, Part I, Chapter 96, Section 1961(1)(A) and 1961(1)(B), "Extortion".
The definition of "Extortion in this case is from USC Title 18, Part I, Chapter 95, Section 1951(b)(2); specifically: (emphasis mine).
It seems pretty clear to me that this falls into the same category as the civil application of RICO to the RAMBUS patents, and to similar recent cases.
So, IMO, rather than expecting the ISO to get into the act, it's more likely time to involve your local Federal prosecutor, instead.
-- Terry