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ISO Could Withdraw JPEG Standard

Posted by timothy on from the thanks-forgent-have-a-nice-day dept.

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.

4 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh, please... by Tayto · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Fight what good fight? Forgent broke no laws. Ethically they may be far from clean, but there is no case to be fought here in the courts. Perhaps it can be used to highlight the futility of patents in the public mind, and to other governments around the world - but as it stands, patents are too entrenched in the US for anything to remove them.

    The only thing that could improve the situation is that the MPAA find that patents are beginning to eat into their profits, and get their pet senators into action ;-)

  2. Too late. by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Even if the ISO turns JPG into a non-standard, it is in too much use to make a difference. The idea of a standard is to establish the common use and give people safety in having a known way to implement/work with this "standard." This is already done. Forgent has already stole this benefit!

    I want this patent invalidated, then the companies that paid money to go after them for fraud.

    --
    Fight Spammers!
  3. Prior Art For What? by StevenMaurer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Again, speaking as an expert, Forgent Networks patent has NOTHING to do with JPEG. It is quite hard to find prior art for a patent claim that doesn't apply.

    One would hope they'd just fight this nusance lawsuit in court.

  4. Re:This is a Good Thing(tm) by mosch · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My exact words were that you should attempt to make a switch to PNG. If such a switch is not practical for your content, then clearly this isn't a good option. Nowhere did I suggest that you should induce suffering or death upon yourself over some JPEG-related patents.

    Whining is a bad thing, because habitual complaints put the attention of the complainers, not the problem itself. 1,000 posts noting the state of the patent system, corporate greed and a lack of ethics in modern society will not get us royalty-free jpegs, end microsoft's desktop monopoly, cause the RIAA to support P2P, cause the MPAA to support transferable digital video content, allow musicians to get paid, prevent violations of the GPL or give you a way to overclock your Celeron 300 to be faster than a daul Athlon MP 2100+.

    On the other hand, discussions about possible solutions for each issue, methods to educate the public about the problem and methods to enact action at a local level can make a difference. Perhaps somebody here works for a corporation of sufficient size and influence to get proper PNG support in the next version of IE. Perhaps somebody here has been thinking about implementing support for another graphics format in mozilla, and might be driven to take that step.

    It's impossible to know what could be accomplished if slashdot attempted to direct the energy it spends mindlessly whining at analyzing the problems the community has identified, and analyzing possible solutions.

    Whining on slashdot is masturbation, it may be fun but it doesn't change anything. Pretending otherwise is as unrealistic as my hope that this post may inspire a rational discussion as to what the realistic remedies to this situation are, and what the full impact of this situation really is.

    After all, perhaps somebody could talk to these folks and get them to license the patent for free to open source software, thus garnering good will, and they could then just milk the PhotoShops and such of the world.

    Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.