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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.
Just think of all the Pr0N I'll have to pay royalties on!
Am I the only one who thinks the ISO should stand up and fight the good fight?
Maybe this would be a way to stop this patent / Intellectual Property nightmare once and for all.
What about patents not applying if the implementation is open source and not-for-profit?
Well, I guess I can keep on dreaming... =(
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Its about time that a precedent be set in the patent-crap(tm) going on these days. If a company is going to assert its patents and charge people for it after so long, it is more than justified to play hardball and in essence say "we'll pull your patent-laden bullsh*t off the list of standards". Okay sure, the alternatives are there but disk-space/image-quality/browser support must be there before anything will work. Before anyone says that PNG works as a replacement, I would have to say that the size increase alone prohibits their use especially on high-traffic sites where bandwidth counts.
It'll be a new way for webmasters of the sex trade to make money:
"Our women are 100% patent-free!"
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Since every image format known to man seems to be under the control of some kind of patent, I propose that the ONLY supported graphic format for all our web applications should be ASCII art, that way we should avoid all the patent mess, also ASCII art is probably the most widely available format and already has a module for gimp.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Jpeg is a STANDARD, doesnt matter about the patents it has. It has been STANDARDIZED through the test of time, I will grow to despise the new legislature. My digital camera can take either Jpeg or TIFF (tiffs too big) so i really dont have THAT Much of a choice. Image conversion is a pain in the ass.
As strange as it sounds, this is actually a good move. We do NOT want jpeg on the list of standards if an entity can maintain patented control over it. Granted we will all still use jpeg, however ISO is definatly trying to make a point here - "you cant exclusively own it, and have it be an open standard" we should be happy that ISO is standing up for this!
So far as I can tell, this is what the ISO certainly should do, according to the letter and spirit of their policies. But I doubt it will have any effect on the situation except as a feel-good measure for those against the patent claim. I can't see how it will put any pressure on the dicks trying to claim patent rights; even if the ISO withdraws official standing, it will remain a de facto standard.
ISO is a standardization body, it does nobody any good for them to get in the middle of a stupid dispute like this.
Putting moderation advice in your
It's also about every device that captures JPEG (digicams) and renders JPEG (web browsers) that is big enough for Forgent to demand money from. Personal decisions to move to PNG are fine and dandy and probably will win you some personal satisfaction, but in the greater scheme of things, JPEG is more entrenched in computing than a simple "OK, let's just whip up a script to batch everything over to PNG."
Maybe, but PNG and JPEG are two entirely different paradigms.
JPEG is a lossy algorithm, which gets rid of "unnoticeable" parts of the image, in order to lower the file size.
PNG, on the other hand, is a lossless algorithm, which, when decompressed, gives you byte-for-byte the original image.
If we lose PNG, we can come up with something else. Good lossless algorithms abound. But, AFAIK, there aren't that many GOOD replacements for JPEG.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
does any one else think that this may be a bit premature? after all, they have merely said that they may have patants on parts of the algorithm. As far as we know -- an obviously we dont know everything -- they have not proved it yet.
In addition, what is the point of doing it now? AFIK there were legal limits on enforcing your patent after you let people adopt it.
Personally, i have nothing against patents but this does seem rather silly.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
It's clear that Forgent is going after companies that develop browsers, sell image editing tools, etc., but on your typical Unix/Linux platform these tools often are "just" linked to libjpeg where the real encoding and decoding is done. In this case might they try to go after anyone whose name appears in the libjpeg sources? Ack!
...that it is time for jpeg2000.
Too bad this patent covers the whole spectrum of compressing images by removing redundant data.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Microsoft to enforce ".exe" patent. Bill Gates quoted, "All your program are belong to us."
:)
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
I want this patent invalidated, then the companies that paid money to go after them for fraud.
Fight Spammers!
I own a cute little Canon Digital Elph that happens to save images in the formerly-standard JPEG format.
Exactly what happens if the patent is upheld? Am I personally liable? In theory, could Forgent come after me for royalties?
What happens if you buy and use a product that later on turns out to infringe on someone's patent?
Offhand I don't recall any language in any fine print anywhere that says I'm held harmless, it's all the vendor's fault.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If it was patented in, what, 1987, won't it expire shortly anyway, like the RSA patent, in, what, 17 years? 2004?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Anyway, the issue at stake here is not just about whether or not JPGs can or cannot be used; if Forgent gets away with this, the door is open for all other companies to get away with submerging their patents and then springing royalties onto us. GIFs have been taken from us, and now it looks as if JPGs will be taken from us as well, and I don't think that it's a good idea to rely on just one picture format. I'd rather have choice, thanks very much.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
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.
Ludicrous claim, yes. There's no way it'll kill off the JPeG format. The files are too well entrenched into everything we do and litigation against companies with embedded decoders would go way past the 2 years left on their patent.
Though by all means I'd love to see someone try to sue Microsoft because of Internet Explorer. Just like smokers trying to sue the tobacco industry: wait the plaintiff out until he/she pases on from the cause of the lawsuit. 15 million is way more than the 2-3mil corporate lawyers would make off the case.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Am I the only one who thinks the ISO should stand up and fight the good fight?
The problem is the whole patent system. You don't fight that by overturning a single patent claim: You do it by rigorously applying the existing scheme. If that leads to unacceptable results, that will demonstrate the problem.
Nope, no sig
According to this document utility patents last 20 years and design patents last 15. If as the article indicates this letigation is after two decades of usage in JPEG, then either JPEG existed before the patent or the patent is about to expire, if it hasn't yet done so.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Can you answer this?
If a patent doesn't specifically mention a process in the list of claims, but the process is described in the patent, does the patent cover that process?
The "JPEG patent" doesn't list the JPEG method, nor does it list a technical description of the method in the list of claims. It does describe the JPEG algorithm in the body of the patent. Does the patent cover the JPEG algorithm?
As if the fact that ISO would no longer recognize JPEG as a standard would affectthe WIDE spread user base already in place.
Do you think ISO not recognizing it is gonna cause millions of web masters to take them down, or stop millions of browsers from seeing them ? This is silly hot air and rhetoric by the ISO. It is like saying they are gonna revoke the standard on the wheel and expect everyone to stop using it....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Are you sure about that?
What if PNG is challenged - will your viewpoint stand?
Over the last few years thousands of patents have been granted, the bulk of which probably shouldn't have - especially in software that has such a massive worldwide explosion in new "inventions" which the orignal authors have not patented - then 10 or 20 years later someone patents it.
The patent office (who make their money from granting patents) don't have the time or the inclination to do a full search - especially when most of the source is hidden from view - it's not just book publishing or visible inventions that need to be searched. But of course, that is an impossible task (and probably breaking a few license agreements plus the DCMA to boot).
So what will this do? Well, the file formats will be published by big corporations who have a large portfolio to challenge other companies. Other people will not be able to risk publishing their formats or their source code. So the world loses - and that includes corporations who are just too blind to see it yet.
Is this really the intention of IP laws? I don't think so.
Regards
Rob Probin
(photo of revolver up against dog's head) If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog!
314-15-9265
what if ISO threw a party and nobody came?
For line-art, vectors, and indexed-color graphics, png, gif [bleh], or svg should already be used, but JPEG is in wide use, and there isn't a replacement for lossy compression.
Slashdot poll time: Will people(companies) 1) pay attention to ISO 2) develop a new format 3) be a conscientous objector 4) move with CowbowNeal to a country without software patents?
Ironically, our saving grace may come from Microsoft, as they have the employees and the browser to implement any standard they want. They could develop a royalty-free lossy compression format, submit it to ISO/ECMA for certification, and put it in the next IE patch/upgrade within half a year.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
-F-
Just fuck em.
They're claims are worthless, due to the fact that: (1) they had nothing what-so-ever to do with JPEG; (2) There is prior art.
Aside from that, litigation takes a while. In 2004, these patents expire. Odds are, there's no way in hell they are going to be able to go after a significant number of entities in this 2-year period and win cases. Cases alone can take 2-years.
This is just a desperate money-grabbing attempt. Besides, what court is going to grant them a patent on JPEG? That'd mean that the entire US government -- including the judicial branch -- would have been infringing on this JPEG patents and would owe billions of dollars to this shitless company.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Many posters seem to be missing the point. No matter what your religious view of other formats like PNG or GIF, the fact remains that there are plenty of devices out there right now, like digital cameras, (and so obviously will be for the next six months or so tas well) that produce JPG files. Personally I would like to see JPG replaced with a lossless format, or a least an option to select a format without loss and visual artifacts, but for quite a while there is going to be a need for software tools that manipulate JPG files. If this bogus claim is allowed to stand the effect will be that as software is updated it will often no longet support JPG files (remember how fast GIMP dropped GIF support?) It strikes me as pretty intolerable to have to revert to old software to use a camera or a clipart CD. This issue does matter, even if your personal belief is that there are other and better formats.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Does anyone else have any other links to confirm or (more likely) deny this?
They're kinda like the Weekly World News of technology. You know, the people who brought us BatBoy?
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
I think this is another case that points to the need for (yuck) more legislation. There needs to be a new law, one that takes the concept of public knowledge and applies it to existing patents. IE, this case, where JPEG has become public knowledge, to the extent it has an ISO standard, yet just now someone comes up saying they have the rights to it because of patent X. As I understand it, you can't gain a patent on something if it's already public knowledge. They need to extend that to say if you have a patent and you make it public knowledge, you can't then claim the rights to the resulting use.
Basically, this is like someone patenting a water powered car, then letting everyone build there own because they don't have the money to have a manufacturing facility, and then 5 years later when everyone and their brother is driving a water powered car, you come out and say "ok, now you all owe me 10%". It's ridiculous, and criminal.
~ now you know
ISO is doing this to make a statement, not because they are under any delusion that there will will be any real world effect of removing the JPEG standard. I applaud them for doing this. ISO is a well respected organization with global visibility, and I hope this will be a wake-up call to countries considering following the US' path into software patent foolishness.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If you made software which did any work with jpegs, however, then yes... you would be.
The amount of software out there that does this is STAGGGERING... Personally, I just think we should ignore it, tell Forgent to go F*** themselves, and by the time they get around to really suing anybody the patent will have expired. Meanwhile, the big boys that Forgent did manage to get into court can countersue Forgent for fraud, for attempting to enforce patent royalties after over 17 years of it being royalty free.
If they had wanted their money so badly, they should have started enforcing it when they first patented it, not almost 2 decades later. What Forgent is pulling here is bullsh**, and even _they_ probably know it. Ignore it, and it will go away.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
You don't actually have to be successful at stoping them, you can even just put up a sign that says "no trespassing" and that will maintain your right to introduce more stringent enforcement later.
A similar law but badly implemented law (at least i presume the same law doesn't cover both cases) is what results in authors habitually telling fans "no" when they ask about doing fanfiction, even if the author doesn't mind that particular person writing that particular fanfic. Allowing some fans to write fanfiction can (stupidly) cause them to lose some legal control over their work.
The ideal behind both being that you should not be able to "fool" the public (either intentionally or unintentionally) into believing they have free right to something, and then suddenly start restricting or charging them once the object in question has been taken for granted/come into standard use/whatever is appropriate for the object in question.
I would think that this is exactly the situation such laws were trying to prevent, and i wonder if any of them apply.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Thousands? Over the last few *years*? You've got to be kidding me. Thousands of patents have been issued in the past few *weeks*. The trademark and patent office puts out a book every single week which lists all the patents and trademarks issued since the last book. The book is always at least 1000 pages long.
Coding system for reducing patent redundancy
Abstract
The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for processing patents to remove redundant information thereby making the patents more suitable for transfer and storage through a limited-bandwidth medium. The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in intellectual property systems. Typically, the system determines differences between the current input patents and the previous input patents using mean-square difference of the patents. These mean-square of the patents are processed and compared with one or more thresholds of redundency for determining one of several modes of operation. After processing in some mode, the sucessfully processed patents are in the form of digital numbers and these digital numbers are coded, using ordered redundancy coding, and stored in the database.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
JPEG is a "de facto" standard, like the others you mention.. Which is to say it's in use, and will be used (probably) in the future.
On the other hand, it's ALSO currently a "de jure" standard, which is to say it has the "seal of approval" of a standards body, in this case, ISO.
There is a difference, and it has a lot to do with how standards bodies work and how governments relate to them.
The logo on the JPEG homepage is actually a gif.
...that 10 months after Gordon Matthews is desginated to "mine" the company's patent portfolio, finds the JPEG patenent and then he turns up dead?
Hmmm?
Gordon Matthews dies
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.
The date is July 11th 1992. The GNU people are once again safe from patent law... gzip has saved the LZW-hampered compress from kneeing the GNU project in the other groin.
...
... minion ... here, will pose as a new board member. After the deed is done, he will fake his own death, and in the resulting chaos, all blame will be passed on to him.
RMS is still not relaxed however. He knows the Achilles heel of his plan to free the hearts and minds of all thinking beings in the world is patents. Restlessly, he searches for an answer, but as yet, it has eluded him. Later that day, one of his minions shows up and senses something is on his master's mind.
Minion0: What is wrong, master? Has someone threatened freedom again?
RMS: Rest easy young minion. Today, at least the battle has been won, but I fear the war may still be lost.
Minion0: You can't mean...
RMS: No, no, my facade as a badly-dressed over-zealous hippie will not be breeched. Be assured that it is inconcievable for anyone to see past my BO.
Minion0: Phew. But yet, I sense something's amiss.
RMS: Patents may yet be our downfall. The dark forces has threatened us before with them, and soon they will again.
Minion0: But, cannot we impress upon the minds of our leaders the importance of this?
RMS: Alas, in that respect our actions will be in vain. Our only chance lies with being more wise than them.
Minion0: I was worried there for a moment... here, let me get the champagne!
RMS: Perhaps it is good that we rejoice in our small victory. But the lull will not last and yet...
Minion0: And yet?
RMS: The time is not yet ripe. Rest assured, this patent war, we shall win!
And so, after a brief victory celebration, the GNU people return to their secret identities of coders who are brilliant, yet in need of basic hygiene.
Yet RMS continues to plan, in the dark and twisting corners of his mind.
We rejoin RMS on April 1 2001, in the boardroom of a relatively unknown company named VTEL. The board members of this struggling company wonder what the darkly dressed stranger has to say.
RMS: My plan is nearly complete. One this is done, you will not only have saved freedom from certain doom, but have struck a terrible blow at the very heart of the dark forces opposing us.
Boardmember0: But, would this not cause us to become unpopular and even shunned by our families?
Boardmember1: And what if there are complications?
RMS: All of the above has been taken care off... My
Minion0: Naturally, you will never see me or RMS again after this meeting.
RMS: And so, we have prepared new identities in any country of your choice for you and your loved ones. We chose your company because it would make the least impact on your social lives.
Boardmember0: But this name change? Would it not raise questions to the observer?
RMS: Only to those who are free from the dark influences. Fortunately for us, our counterparts are oft blinded by the smell of money...
And so, we reach our present day. The dominoes of fate are all in place, and we can only hope that freedom will prevail!
You seem to be unaware that there are two common meanings of the word "standard" in the computer industry.
.doc and SMB are this type of "standard."
.doc).
You seem to be operating under the more general definition, which is often phrased as "de facto standard" meaning "standard from the fact."
The other, more strict, usage is a formal standard published by a standards body. HTML 4.0 and JPEG are this type of "standard." (In addition to being the other kind.)
ISO is a standards body, and can most certainly retract a standard that they published in the first place.
Now, as to your qalitative analysis of ISO (and by implication, other standards bodies) I have to disagree with your assessment. I think that technical merit, to included social/legal difficulties with implementation, is exactly what ISO and friends should be doing. Getting behind the de facto "standard" of the month without regard to technical merit would be a total waste of time.
Furthermore, I think you belittle their true contribution when you intimate that they are only a "cheerleading group." Interoperation doesn't happen by magic. Without a published standard JPEG wouldn't be so universally interoperable (witness
-Peter
If nobody gives in to their frivolous lawsuits then the patent is likely to be less defensible than if somebody does give in. Similar things happened for windowing in Y2K as well as many algorithms of wrapping around the century and finding dates in code. The bad news is that if a bunch of people pay these folks to go away then it helps validate their position and everybody could have to pay. Just my .02 worth...
This jpeg patent deal is like a storm. Sure it makes a hell of a mess but, when it's over, the world is fresh and new.
All you open-source types should realize the value of Forgent doing this!
This will pave the way for more mainstream people saying, "Hey! Wait a minute! I'm not going to get caught with my pants down again! You know, 'Fool me once...' So I'M switching to open-source software with appropriate licensing to guarantee that these scoundrels can't screw me again!"
In other words, situations like this and with Microsoft claiming patent rights on OpenGL will only encourage people to stay away from propriety, corporate-sponsored software and move to open, community-sponsored software that much faster!
Hip hip hooray for Forgent! They're scheming slimy dirtballs but sometimes those people, in their greed and lust for power and money, accidentally do something that'll just screw their own kind in the long run.
Someone else may have published this but this would force people towards a better overall standard.
Also isn't there an open JPEG2000 standard coming out soon?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
What is Adobe's stance on this issue with Photoshop? Did they pay a for a license?
What is MS's stance on this for IE? Did they pay for a license?
What about Mozilla? Are they going to pay for a license?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
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.
why do you applaud them? they aren't taking a stand on anything; they are just following their own rules.
If a standard is encumbered by patents, unless they are available on RAND terms, then it cannot be an official standard.
This is not them speaking out against anything, they are simply stating what they must do.
Unisys will sue Forgent for not paying any royalties on the software used to generate the 42 gif images on their webpage.
.JPG image on their webpage (http://www.unisys.com/corporate/images/home/home/ content/main_photo_homepage.jpg)
While that is going on. Forgent will sue Unisys for not paying any royalties on the
When the lawyers have taken all of their money, both of them will declare bankruptcy and go out of business.
S.E.S.S.D.E.N.E.E.NW from west end of hall of mists
I wonder what image format GNU.ORG will use on it's website, now...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do they do anything besides extort for patents?
Does anybody know anybody who has contracts with Forgent? Does anybody have influence over that? If so, they need to be dropped.
The governments are slow to respond. This patent nonsense is ridiculous. What needs to start happening is "takedowns". A company like Forgent comes out of nowhere and demands royalty payments on something which has been in widespread use for a very long time on the assumption it was not so legally encumbered. This company never even contributed to the algorithm in the first place, so the argument that it's "fair recompence for fair work" is obviously bogus; it's nothing more than extortion which is legal under laws that are out of date. That company then needs to get spanked, and hard, and pubically. They need to suffer bigtime for their arrogance and their mistake. Everybody else needs to see them suffer, so that they will think twice before trying the same bullshit trick.
Anybody who is giving money to Forgent now needs to stop. Companies and individuals, or whoever Forgent currently makes money off, needs to boycott them, cancel their contracts. Forgent needs to go out of business, and it needs to be public and messy. We can't sit back and take it every time some piss-ant little technology-wannabe firm (a category in which I'd include Unisys nowadays) comes forward and starts claiming violation of "their" intellectual property. Somebody somehow has got to start putting these people in their place.
These parasites on society create nothing but grief; they do all sorts of damage to the community at large, getting rich themselves. It's no better than the behavior of the execs at Enron, it just happens to be legal. The system needs to be reformed; I wish our government would see their way through to doing that, but I don't have much hope. (Hell, our government is too busy going in the other direction with things like the DMCA, TIPS, and everything else that makes us so happy.).
What's t say that some other lawyer isn't going to claim that thay have a patent on one or more of the algorithms used in Jpeg 2000?
The JPEG committee, which is developing the JPEG2000 standard, has issued a call to entities who claim to own patents on technologies necessary to implement JPEG2000 compression to disclose their intellectual property. The companies that have disclosed such patents have agreed to license them to the general public on a royalty-free basis.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sometimes I don't get our economy. Although I understand that companies want to make money and profit from their products or services, I don't get why some companies are at the public's throat most of the time. Don't the executives get that by making the public angry they're not doing any good to the company's reputation? Do they really expect me to buy anything that involves a JPEG algorithm after a scandal that they put on? If everybody starts pushing for patents and enourmous fees nobody will be willing to do any business, because nobody wants to be sued. I have nothing against patens, they're cool, they can profit an inventor to a reasonable degree and benefit the public at the same time. The companies that hold patents, should be proud of them and open them up to the public, after all that everybody will benefit from whatever they invent and chances are that they're going to make more money than buy suing each other.
In order for a patent to apply, all of it's claims must be met.
I wouldn't be so sure. A typical patent contains a plurality of independent claims ("A computer with memory and a first image source...") and a plurality of dependent claims ("The invention of claim 2, where in addition..."). If a device matches an independent claim exactly, it infringes the patent. Dependent claims exist so that if the independent claim is found to be obvious or not novel, the patent owner has additional inventions. In this case, any device that matches a nullified independent claim plus one or more non-nullified claims dependent on that claim infringes the patent.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No, that's trademark law. Patents are viable until the prescribed date they become invalid.
That's what I thought until I learned about the "laches" doctrine.
Will I retire or break 10K?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/17/124225 7&mode=thread&tid=106
There is a much better approach. We need to lobby our Government bodies to insist on using software that defaults to non-proprietary file standards (I'm going to refer to these as OFS(Open File Standards) from now on) as a first step.
OFS(Open file Standards) are a cause that we can get support from all computer users, as it benefits Linux but also Mac, Solaris and even M$ OS users.
A good argument to use is that the requirements to make information open and publicly available is discriminatory to poor people if the file standards require paying the M$ tax. An amendment to the FOIA(Freedom Of Information Act) at the federal and state levels is what to ask for. When the Feds require open file standards, Linux will become much more competitive. Once the files standards are open, Linux can easily succeed.
Be aware that GIF, JPG, are not open standards. Even PDF cannot be modified to add functionality. If Adobe decides to come out with a super set of PDF and collect royalties they have every right to do so. What we should push for is for the government (particularly the Federal level) to support open standards, free to all, much as the bureau of standards has done for units of measure (let's hope no one claims a patent on the meter).
Furthermore, we need to ask that all the extensions of government web pages be free of proprietary structures so that any browser will be assured of displaying the page content without depending on proprietary plugins.
In an ideal game of dirty legal pool, with large or unlimited funding, what terrible trauma could someone like IBM (or even the MPAA) legally inflict on Forgent to shut the company down and acquire their patent, assuming that the patent stands?
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.
It won't affect me much, as my systems are all built from sources. And most of the tools that can potentially do jpegs can be built without jpeg support. But it's sad to hear that users of binary Linux distros may be hurt by this.
Not true. I have a Sony DSC-P1 Cybershot that cost around $500 when I got it (it's disco'd, so it's probably less if you can find it now). It shoots at a max resolution of 2048*1536 and can save as a TIFF. That will print a good-looking 8x10 and an excellent 5x7. Granted, you can't hold more than a couple of photos on anything smaller than a 128 Meg MemoryStick, but the quality (especially black-and-white) is excellent for the price.
I just took an 80kb PNG image from mandrake.com, converted it to a bitmap, and zipped the bitmap. The resulting zip file was about 50kb. I also tried the same thing with some PNGs that I had created for my website, and a similar thing happened. Conclusion: ZIP compression is better than PNG?
-Peter
and you don't think the big company is gonna pass the buck on to you, the end user?
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
How is this a threat to JPEG use? Does anyone believe that people use JPEG because of the ISO? Or do they use it because it's a great and convenient way to store images?
I'm afraid far more than this is necessary to fix the problem, unfortunately this threat doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
IBM, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital all have significant interest in PNG being used instead of JPEG. :-)
Seriously, though, JPEG was made in an era when the size of images was a serious issue. Heck, we can toss hundreds of full-length divx movies on a new hard drive. I'm not so sure that image compression is as big a deal any more. I sample-compressed Lena, and got these results:
263058 lena.bmp
32141 lena.jpg
151085 lena.png
So the png image is lossless (and thus can be edited and resaved and whatnot) and is only about five times as big. Can we seriously not handle images that are five times as large? Consumer demand for hard drives is way down right now because they don't need or want more space than they get with existing hard drives. Lossy compression has always been seen (at least by me) as a transitional thing.
So how about it? Throw off the bonds of lossy compression?
May we never see th
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.
They can do whatever they want: you don't have the legal right to produce something if it infringes on patent A. They can charge a percentage, a flat fee, simply refuse to let you use the patent at all...whatever.
May we never see th
This is a good place to mention a project I am working on. I wasn't going to announce it quite yet because it's unfinished, but this JPEG news could change things.
I have modified zlib to support a simple form of lossy compression for images. The Lempel-Ziv compression stage works by looking for repeated strings in the data, and when a string is found just output a reference back to the previous occurrence. But what if this string matching allowed some deviation? More strings would be matched and the output file would be smaller, but there would be some loss of quality.
My implementation tries to do a kind of 'dithering string match' where it finds the longest possibel match where the total pixel difference (sum of squared differences of pixel values) is less than some given threshold. But the error in one pixel is taken into account when matching the next, so that one pattern of dithered pixels has a reasonable chance of matching another.
At present I just have the modified zlib and I am using it to compress 8-bit and 24-bit PNM images lossily. That is, with some reduction in quality I can compress a PNM image down to say 20 kilobytes, while gzip would compress it to 50 kilobytes. By adjusting the threshold you can trade off quality against file size (with threshold=0 you have plain gzip compression). The space saving and quality loss depend on the type of image being compressed. But the results so far are encouraging; with a bit more ingenuity in the matching algorithm it should be possible to do better.
To recap, so far I just have a modified zlib compressing 8-bit and 24-bit PNM images. I am trying to extend libpng to use this lossy zlib, but the trouble is that PNG headers should not be compressed lossily, just the pixel data. Also I need to deal with images that have more than one pixel per byte. (Although the results are still fairly good if you take a paletted image and convert it to 8-bit greyscale before lossy compression.)
I have quickly put together a web page Lossy PNG to demonstrate what has been done so far. I'm going away on holiday soon so I won't be able to make a working release for a while, but perhaps this proof of concept will encourage others to work on the idea.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Firstly, the money paid will presumably be passed on the consumer. Secondly, it means that companies are more likely to start using their own proprietary compression rather than JPEG, which reduces the utility of the devices. It's going to be a pain in the ass if you've gotta convert all your pictures into JPEGs yourself, rather than have the camera do it for you.
Spanked hard pubically, eh?
My, you are kinky.
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
Stallman, time to change that logo!
Even better is the Canon Raw (CRW) format that the higher-end Canon cameras use (G1, G2, D30, D60, etc). It just dumps the output from the CCD to a file. It's smaller than a TIFF image since it takes into account the subsampling of red and green. It is also independant of white balance settings, since it's only recording the CCD output and not transforming the color space in the camera and losing information.
My other first post is car post.
I didn't mean that being and artist and being a web designer are mutually exclusive, just that they are orthogonal.
I know, I was just being funny. (well not very funny but I tried).
But let me defend GOOD Graphic designers as artists though. There is an art to good graphic design but that art is not only concerned with how good something looks (I don't think that is EVER the sole criterion of art) but also how effectively it communicates. Your rant is not any where near as venomous as those you will sometimes hear from graphic design professors ripping into a students project during a crit because their beautiful piece failed to effectively communicate the content of it's message.
The two are not mutually exclusive, but I would suggest that they are also not entirely orthogonal. Art is after all a way of communicating. Your rant is less about web designers trying to be artists but of certain web designers being BAD artists.
Raw format is not an option for many because of two reasons:
1. time. Raw images take a LOT of processing power. Just viewing the damn things on my 1.4GHz Athlon takes 20 seconds. Also, the software from Canon sucks in other ways (UI) and is Windows only. That alone is a deal breaker for many here.
2. space. The jpg's from my D30 are about 1mb each. Raw format files are 4-5mb. I have taken 9000 pictures with my D30. Instead of 9GB of images I'd be looking at 45GB. That is not acceptable to me.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The patent is 17 years old, and only now is it put in use. Think how many patents are given to software nowadays. According to the article, in Japan there are 4,000 patents on image and wavelet technology alone. Think of what will happen in 15 years, when companies start bringing out all-but-forgotten patents on everyday algorithms from the good ol' dot-com days... The devastation will be much, much larger...
I doubt, therefore I may be.
I take your points.
Let me clarify a bit. Certainly graphic design is an art, and graphic designers are artists (for better or worse).
My rant was really about web designers who are more interested in making their site look "cool" (which usually looks lame to me) than in generating actual HTML. The ultimate point is that a site is beautiful in theory (and/or IE), but is not written in actual HTML is generally useless, and (internal corporate) websites are about information not beauty.
-Peter
Yeah, tell me how I'm going to "seamlessly and immediately" switch the FIRMWARE of my digital camera from using jpeg to png?
What's that you say? You don't want to write assembly for my camera (since I don't know assembly for that CPU)? You don't want to find the appropriate chip and burn a replacement for me (I don't know what chip it uses, nor if blanks are easily obtainable)? You don't want to physically dissassemble the very tiny mechanisms to install (wave solder?) the new chip in and reassemble it all so the optics path is clean?
You do, but not for less than the cost of the camera?
Well, then... I guess I can't "seamlessly and immediately" switch everything to PNG format, can I?
[What about companies] who have decided not to answer the JPEG committee's "call to disclose their intellectual property"?
If JPEG committee members refrain from disclosing their IP, those members are dropped from the JPEG committee (and possibly from all of ISO); just look what happened when Rambus pulled a fast one on JEDEC. If third parties who own patents on JPEG2000 but aren't members of ISO refrain from disclosing their IP, they risk being shut out of the market; just look what happened to Rambus's market share.
Will I retire or break 10K?
1. This page has a bunch of tools for manipulating CRW files in Linux. There is a converter to convert them to 48-bit files. I'm sure you can set up something to batch-convert them.
2. If you spend $2000 on a camera body plus more for accessories, you can spend $100 on an extra 60GB IDE drive for your computer. Anyone who buys that camera wants the highest quality images. Even if you're making pr0n and you will only post the low-resolution JPG's, you will still want the high-resolution raw files for archival purposes.
My other first post is car post.
Nevermind the fact that you, like most other Linux hippies, are in denial of widespread adaption of proprietary formats. MP3? No! Ogg! Flash? No! SVG (or whatever it is)! GIF? No! PNG!
Well, the users with relatively recent versions of eg. Winamp and XMMS should hardly have any stress about 'weird minority format called Ogg Vorbis', because the players already have support. Thus the songs just play, no brain activity needed :P So there's hardly downside using it. Similary, PNGs are widely supported by programs these days, so the mainstream users shouldn't have stress about those either. Not even if they personally won't create one PNG in their whole life.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
The more data the more of a pain it is to backup. My current solution is using DVD+RW's. It's a pain, though.
As for the extra disk suggestion, you're partially right. I don't want to add more disks, because of heat and noise problems I already have.
usually
Right there is enough to poke a hole in your argument.
All it takes is one patent holder (be it citzen or corportation) who is not a member of the JPEG committee to to pull a GIF-style patent stunt. It has happened before. It is (maybe) happening now with the current JPEG spec, and it can happen with the new JPEG spec.
Hopefully it won't happen, but it is a real and persistant danger.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.