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Forgent Networks Wins $25M from Sony for JPEG Patent
SuperBanana writes "A story at the Imaging Resource reports that Forgent Networks just won a $25m lawsuit against Sony, for unpaid royalties on patents Forgent bought back in 1997 for $65,000(there's a nice return); the lawsuit concerns patents on 'JPEG encoding and decoding', which Sony's cameras supposedly infringe upon. Sony is challenging the ruling. Older Slashdot stories covered this back in 2002 when this first popped up on people's radar screens, mainly when the ISO threatened to revoke JPEG's ISO status unless Forgent stopped throwing its weight around. Supposedly Forgent only has until 2004 to get all it can out of the patent."
Yes - the PNG format. it's free, works as well(if not better than Jpeg), and all the browsers support it.
We've been using PNG for the past 3 years for our projects without any problems or hitches.
Take a look at the PNG Home Site
It wasn't Forgent Networks that won the 25m, it was St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants Inc.. It just happens to be that the Forgent Networks patent lisence fees that Sony began paying allowed St. Clair to win the case.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
The headline and the text of the Slashdot submission are wrong. Sony paid $16M to Forgent Network some time ago as part of an out-of-court settlement. But this article is about a different company: St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants Inc. of Grosse Pointe, Mich. That company is the one that has won $25M in court.
Please read the text of the article and the press release appended to it, and you will see a different story than the one given in the Slashdot submission. The press release contains a quote saying: "this lawsuit is similar to out-of-court settlements reached by Forgent Networks and Dallas based law firm [...]" but the two cases are different. They are both bad, but the companies are different.
-Raphaël
They both have their uses. For image storage, PNGs are better as they are lossless, but for transmission over slow links a lossy JPGs is much more effective.
Gifs/pngs are better suited for drawn images with a small variation in detail, where jpeg is better for photographs or other images with high detail.
And PNG support in IE is horrible. In a recent project I worked on recently I had to convert most of the PNGs to GIFs because IE did not support transparency correctly, let alone the alpha channel. Things were wonderful in Mozilla, whereas in IE they were horrible with lots of jagged edges and I did not know why at the time. Then I realised it was the alpha channel that Mozilla blended the image correctly with the background, and in IE it was a mess. I had to make various gifs with different color backgrounds to achieve the same effect in IE.
The project I am talking about is in here. You can use login test, password test to see what I am talking about, namely the icons on the table after login. It's in portuguese but you shouldn't have many problems with that I hope.
Regards,
pedro
No, I don't think so. The Forgent patent covered DCT-based image/video compression schemes (cut up your image into small blocks; apply a discrete cosine transform to each block; quantize the DCT coefficients, allocating little precision to high frequencies; do some sort of entropy coding on the quantized coefficients), i.e. JPEG and MPEG video. JPEG 2000 is wavelet-based and not covered by this patent, though I am somewhat worried by their choice of arithmetic coding as their entropy coding. I was under the impression that some aspect of implementing arithmetic coding was a little shady, patent-wise (but I don't have any hard facts on that).
Shows that one should use media that is open and patent free (such as ogg/png/etc) after all...
Shows that there is no such thing as "open and patent free". Remember the "burn all GIFs" days? As PNG support wasn't widespread enough yet, many a GIF was reencoded into JPEG, as that was open and patent free. People thought.
Actually, if you read the patents linked from the article, they aren't even patents on JPEG. They make claims on the use of compressed storage formats in digital cameras, such as JPEG.
What digial camera doesn't have the capability to store compressed images? Nobody would buy a camera that wasted memory by storing uncompressed images. Therefore, these are essentially patents on digital cameras!