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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."
I bet there was a lot of people's reaction to the title that went something like this:
"I hope this doesn't change anything about my JPEG pr0n"
The patent system is increasingly under abuse, and the US Patent office will allow anything through. It's past time for a revamp of the whole system, the removal of a lot of patents and make some areas un-patentable again.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
Nothing wakes up the apathetic masses quite like this ruling. I wonder if we will ever live in a world where more than 5/10 people realize the importance of open standards. I can dream.
Does this also affect JPEG 2000?
Shows that one should use media that is open and patent free (such as ogg/png/etc) after all...
They claim they couldn't read the "pay royalties" memo because it was a low-quality save and therefore too blurry...
- Welcome the coming of the New World Odour
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
This sux. Can I say it loud_enough. These people did not earn this, same as the cretin water rights speculators. How about someone heads over there and throws a few bricks through their stupid selfish window.
The legal system has become the new stock exchange. Bloody Hell. They should all be charged for treason.
matt
I thought JPEG was an open standard, why does Forgent stand to profit from this?
Unlike GIF, JPEG was established by a standards body (ISO). Now they want to renege on that.
Register has more info on this one. Weird.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
> Isn't a 384.6% return-on-investment enough for
> them to have got out of it already?
It's a return of 384 times their investment (38400%) but even so...
An interviewer once asked multi-billionaire J. Paul Getty "You're a very rich man. How much is enough?"
He smiled and answered quietly, "Just a little bit more."
There is a fine line between Patents protection and prevention of the propagation of technology. How close do you hold your cards to your chest before you release that your product is so proprietary that no one uses it?
... some of us need to get paid, but chasing patients on industry standards just because you gave it away and now EVERYONE uses it is dumb.
Sony was using JPEG in there cameras... that kept the oh so VALUABLE compressed image technology on our systems. If yah sue everyone that uses your tech then your tech will disappear. We have maybe one other image compression tech? oh no wait, we've got a tone.
I'm not an open source junky
-- Disclaimer: I can't really back up anything I post on
Can I get a patent that covers the application of coloured "pixels" of coloured compounds to a flat surface to be used as an approximation of my visual interpretation of the world as I see it?
I agree, PNG is brilliant, but IE doesn't support it fully, which hinders its use by webmasters a lot (seeing as IE ownz0rs the market, for better or for worse).
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
A standard is something people agree on.
Just because someone somewhere says "this is standard" it does not revoke patents other individuals or organizations have.
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
The patent on GIFs expires soon (June) .. I wonder if Unisys will donate the patent to the public domain a month before it expires (in the tradition of RSA) or will they wait around till it expires and milk every dime off a patent everybody knows they dont deserve.
If you can give a product to the ISO body as a standard, then still file patent claims against people, then what does the ISO standard mean???
.Net functionality?
Does this not pave the way for MS to enforce patents on anyone implementing their
Also, why is it that people say Java is proprietary, but ISO standards are not? In the JCP, in order to get anything accepted, you must relinquish all patent rights in it. Sounds to me like the JCP is better than ISO of ensuring that a standard is not proprietary.
Karma Clown
"Supposedly Forgent only has until 2004 to get all it can out of the patent."
So what? They can still dedicate the next 20 years suing people who violated their patent before 2004.
Instead of working hard and being creative, companies (and individuals) have chosen to litigate with crooked lawyers. These lawyers (think Johnny Cochran type) aren't creative, aren't smart, they are simply crooks. It's almost like they advertise and recruit through high profile cases such as this. Juries, Judges, and the public at large are being taken advantage of the same way the mafia takes advantage of an industry or commodity. In this case and cases such as Bezos being able to patent every type of transaction that uses a mouse click, and in most cases, the entire Microsoft Apple/Netscape trials, the judicial systems knowledge of the small details are taken advantage of.
I agree with you, this will have the effect, if successful, of invalidating the technology (JPEG) - a new standard will arise. I am both happy and concerned that it may be Sony though. They have the muscle and marketting/liscensing power to make a new standard adopted very quickly. However, they also tend get all googly eyed when they have the opportunity to make something proprietary and be the SOLE distributer or patent/copyright/license holder.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Yes, especially the ones in the coma ward, because they can't say no.
GIF, JPEG, ...
... support open standards in your products NOW while you can choose to do it.
MP3. Get it through your heads, people. Using these patent-encumbered tech only comes back to bite you where it hurts -- 5 years down a committed tech track. PNG, OGG,
MORTAR COMBAT!
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
First GIF, now JPEG? I guess we'd better all start using Windows BMP format!
up until last year, JPEG was considered "open". nobody here even suspected JPEG would be in patent trouble.
maybe tomorrow someone will pop up with a patent that covers the compression that zLib uses (g'bye PNG).
who would you yell at then?
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
People like that disgust me. what is the point to having that much money. There is none. He already has more money than most people here will see, and he wants MORE?
Anyways this is probly even further off topic, but what really is the point to amassing monitary wealth? It seems to me that wealth should be given back to the community to try and make it a better place. The path bettering oneself is not through money but through what is inside. You must give up external wealth to gain internal wealth. In the end it isn't the number of toys that matter, but the actions one takes that matter.
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!
Don't assume you're safe in 2004. If they can demonstrate that they were doing research into infringement since before the patent expired, I suspect they can press a case against anyone who did not pay them for back royaltees up to when it expired.
This means that you shoudl not be USING the patented technology UNTIL the patent expires.
Does anyone know EXACTLY what's covered? JPEG is huge and has many optional peices. If someone tells me what bits are patented I will start looking at public code to see what can be changed to preserve functionality while still providing JPEG access.
All of your JPEGs are belong to us.
Yes - the PNG format. it's free, works as well(if not better than Jpeg)
This is ill-informed rubbish and should not have been modded up to its current level of 5. PNG is a replacement for GIF, not a replacement for JPEG. JPEG is a lossy compression scheme intended for photographic images, which can achieve extremely high compression ratios. PNG is a lossless scheme applicable to any kind of image. For photos, you can easily get a factor of 40 compression with JPEG on an image where PNG would give you a factor of only 5. On the other hand, PNG gives excellent compression on line drawings, which JPEG compresses poorly. Apart from the fact that they can both compress images, they have nothing in common and neither is a replacement for the other.