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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."
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?
.02
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
What I find most appalling about this is the fact that Forgent is quite proud of what they've done. I remember the previous /. articles about this case, and the links to the 'success stories' on Forgent's site, explaining how ingenious they were for buying companies (Compression Labs in this case) to increase their patent portfolio, only to extort everybody for money.
Sure Sony has a lot of cash in the bank, but think this, most companies will settle before going to court - easy money: pay, or else!
Ingeious maybe, but immoral in my book. Even amoral in Forgents case.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
How many perpetual motion machines have they allowed in? Maybe they should hire someone with half a brain finally...
Checking out my form of escapism.