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."

Comments

Re:Good

[garcia]

not only that do you think that people care at all about this? Will it affect the 85+% of people that just view the web and the images stored there and have nothing to do with the creation of those images?

Probably not. As long as they can click the porn link and have a picture come up it doesn't matter. Size especially is of little relevance anymore. Broadband = RAM.

Just my worthless .02

Re:Fed up about reading about bad patents

[eenglish_ca]

How many perpetual motion machines have they allowed in? Maybe they should hire someone with half a brain finally...