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

Fed up about reading about bad patents

[nattt]

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.

Re:Fed up about reading about bad patents

[dougmc]

The patent system is increasingly under abuse, and the US Patent office will allow anything through.

As much as I agree with you, I'm not sure that this idea really apply here. If the patent in question expires next year, that means it was granted in 1987 or earlier. When JPEG encoding first `came out', it was pretty revolutionary, and probably even fit the `not obvious to the layperson' rule that the patent office so often ignores. If the original creator of the JPEG process is the one who patented it, then I'd say it's a valid patent. (of course, if he agreed not to enforce it so it could become an ISO standard, that's another matter.)

Though what seems to happen more often is that somebody comes up with something clever, and may or may not patent it. Then somebody else comes along, and either patents the original idea (if not patented) or patents it being used in all kinds of obvious ways (like `doing X ... on a computer' was pretty popular a few years ago.)

Patent reform wouldn't be nearly so important if the patent office could simply follow it's own rules -- i.e. checking for prior art, and disallowing patents on things that are `obvious to the layperson'.

Good

[LegendLength]

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.

Re:Good

[archnerd]

Surely you're refering to tech community and not to the general population? Do you think 5 out of 10 people even understand what "open standards" are?

Sony's defense

[nath_o_brien]

They claim they couldn't read the "pay royalties" memo because it was a low-quality save and therefore too blurry...

Re:jpeg alternative?

[WildThing]

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

I'm confused

[esarjeant]

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.

There is a fine line....

[Voltas]

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?

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 ... 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.

Ownership

[nuggz]

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.

Ummm...Forgent? Read Article...

[Fallen Kell]

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.

Wrong headline: this is not Forgent.

[Raphael]

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.

Unisys

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Implications for C#

[j3110]

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???

Does this not pave the way for MS to enforce patents on anyone implementing their .Net functionality?

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.

There is a fine line... always is for the Sopranos

[adzoox]

Exactly, I liken this to a "new mafia" that has arisen in the tech sector.

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.

Re:jpeg alternative?

[pcardoso]

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

Not exactly JPEG patents

[200_success]

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.

• #6,496,222 Digital camera with memory format initialization
• #6,323,899 Process for use in electronic camera
• #6,233,010 Electronic still video camera with direct personal computer (PC) compatible digital format output
• #6,094,219 Electronic still video camera with direct personal computer (PC) compatible digital format output
• #5,576,757 Electronic still video camera with direct personal computer (PC) compatible digital format output
• #5,138,459 Electronic still video camera with direct personal computer (PC) compatible digital format output

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!