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.

Comments

This is a Good Thing(tm)

[smashr]

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!

Re:This is a Good Thing(tm)

[SirSlud]

-2 for a lack of understanding in social dynamics. Like a flock of birds, humans need to generally be aware that we all agree on something (JPEG is not worth using anymore) before they actually _DO_ something about it.

So no, whining isn't a bad thing, because, if one year down the road our social collective asserts that JPEGs time has come due to the groundword of people expressing dissatisfaction with it now, it will be much easier to move to something else in one fell swoop.

Being a martyr can be useful, but more often its useless. Education takes time, but our actions are far more effective once everybody is on the same page.

Re:This is a Good Thing(tm)

[mosch]

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.

It's not just about your personal preference

[theRhinoceros]

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."

Re:It's not just about your personal preference

[Neon Spiral Injector]

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.

Too late.

[www.sorehands.com]

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.

What is it with you PNG fanatics?

[Dthoma]

You people are all saying "Just switch to PNG" as if it can be done seamlessly and immediately. This is ridiculous. Many images on the Internet are in JPG format. Even assuming people could immediately switch to PNG, this wouldn't solve the problem because JPEG is actually a format where the amount of compression applied to pictures can be varied on a scale of 0 to 100. The amount of compression cannot be fine tuned as well with a PNG image.

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.

Prior Art For What?

[StevenMaurer]

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.

Re:Prior Art For What?

[Sangui5]

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.

like it or not, JPG support is important

[frovingslosh]

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.

Re:This could just mean...

[SnapShot]

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?

A search on patents using "image AND compression" at the US Patent office returned 21314 hits for 1996 through 2002, 6592 from 1991 through 1995, and 3741 from 1986 through 1990. That's a total of 31647 patents in 12 years.

Are you trying to tell me that there is nothing in the Jpeg 2000 specification that couldn't be shoehorned to fit within one of these 31 thousand patents given a sufficiently unscrupulous company and a technically clueless judge???

Re:Oh, please...

[Sangui5]

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."

This will be settled in the courts ;)

[Mr Slushy]

Unisys will sue Forgent for not paying any royalties on the software used to generate the 42 gif images on their webpage.

While that is going on. Forgent will sue Unisys for not paying any royalties on the .JPG image on their webpage (http://www.unisys.com/corporate/images/home/home/ content/main_photo_homepage.jpg)

When the lawyers have taken all of their money, both of them will declare bankruptcy and go out of business.

Re:Since this is the Register, after all.....

[JabberWokky]

The Register is written in a light, almost flippant tone. They often refer to themselves and make very clear what their opinion is on a subject, even predicting how they feel various news items will affect the industry.

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

Timeline, information, conclusions

[tlambert]

There seems to be a lot of misunderstandings around this issue, so someone should put out a timeline and other information. I also can not resist drawing some conclusions.


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:

The term ''extortion'' means the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right.

(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