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31 Lawsuits Filed Over Alleged JPEG Patent
dcrouch writes "Compression Labs has initiated a lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas against 31 major companies for infringement of its 4,698,672 patent. The patent, filed in 1986, includes 46 claims for various embodiments of digital signal compression technology and reportedly covers JPEG compression. From the dates on the face of the patent, it appears that it will expire in October 2004. This looming date may have prompted the suit. Compression Labs will certainly have a fight on its hands. A major question will be why the patentee waited so long to stake its claim. The Eastern District of Texas court has established special patent rules that help speed the progression of litigation."
I thought there was some specific legislation to stop "submarine patents" like this?
Beefy.
Maybe this will be a call for everyone to switch to PNG.
Looks like we should have seen this coming a long time ago..._ not_free_patent
Published Thursday 18th July 2002 17:12 GMT
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/18/jpegs_are
oh and here are some more related articles
Some Google results
_JS
The patent, filed in 1986, includes 46 claims for various embodiments of digital signal compression technology
So they own all forms of digital compression ?
Jpeg is declared a lossey compression format in 2 ways now. 1) Image quality is degraded 2) your bank balance is degraded if you are sued for infringing on its patents
If anything, this will make JPG a more popular format than it already is. If the patent doesn't go through, all programs will be able to use JPG compression for free instead of resorting to PNG. Some peopl4e prefer JPG and won't want to switch... so this might be a boon for providing more JPGs in more applications.
Not that I really support this, because I prefer PNG as well.
I just pulled every JPEG on my server and converted them to PNG.
Half of my images were already in PNG, which made that a bit easier.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
well, I wonder how much they expect to make from the lawsuit in the short time period, since it takes little time to switch to alternative file formats.
I know gimp doesn't have gif native because of the license but does have JPEG. Does this mean that they are going to get targeted for using JPEG?
Evolution or ID?
... Sony electronics was sued today over its use of 8-track tapes.
>A major question will be why the patentee waited so long to stake its claim
I'm quite sure that they didn't understand by themselves until recently when some desperate lawyer was digging the patent archives and found their patent and asked the inventors if they would like to get some cash.
But you have to wait a while to incurr the expensive damages, such as reduced oxygen (increasing CO2! Ahhh!)...
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
I was always under the impression that you are supposed to defend violations of your patent or it goes into the public domain? If this is the case then I don't see this as a long court battle.
Looking at the list of companies in that list, I see one interesting omission from the list of companies being sued, namely Microsoft. I find this slightly surprizing given the number of MS products that use jpegs, doubly so if the aim of this exercise is to raise cash for the patent holders.
They can't be worried about hitting companies that can afford lots of lawyers as there are some big names in that list of companies already.
Anybody know whether the beast of Redmond has paid for a license?
Ok, what the hell is wrong with this picture: I patent an idea. Let the whole world use it as a standard for webpages/compressed images. Let my patent be used in technologies like digital cameras and the like without one single word of infringement or anything. I let this transpire for almost 18 years then BAM! i sue everyone who is using my patent with only a few months left on my patent. It's bullshit if you ask me. Why didnt the damn company sue for patent infringement before it got so out of control? Why is a company allowed to do this. In all honesty you should either do your best to enforce your patent or all you get is a product the no one else can patent. God damned this world is outta control
Or are they just hoping all of IBM's lawyers are tied up with SCO?
Isn't that why IBM is an international company - because they can't fit all their lawyers in the USA?
Reaches for tinfoil - why wan't Microsoft listed? Are there no use jpeg' used in Windows?
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
That is trademarks
Patents do not require that you defend them.
i thought they paid royalties for using jpg to SOMEONE claiming to have a patent, just to cover their ass, seeing as jpg is pretty important to digital cameras... maybe i dreamt it? ;) has done a "disney" and demanded the time limit is extended to "the end of the known universe" or something
as for the patent running out, im surprised noone (microsoft??
Directly from the link:
"The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for processing signals to remove redundant information thereby making the signals more suitable for transfer through a limited-bandwidth medium. The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in video compression systems. Typically, the system determines differences between the current input signals and the previous input signals using mean-square difference signals. These mean-square signals are processed and compared with one or more thresholds for determining one of several modes of operation. After processing in some mode, the processed signals are in the form of digital numbers and these digital numbers are coded, using ordered redundancy coding, and transmitted to a receiver."
So either it's specifically for video, or it's a totally generic compression system. Either way, I don't see how these suits could succeed.
They keep quiet, and focus only on litigation when it has the maximum chance to disrupt others. Yes, indeed, this must be the kind of company Baystar actually wishes to have invested in.
If you've known you had a case but did not bring suit and allowed your damages to mount, your suit is barred by the doctrine of laches. They would have a good argument based on this to either dismiss the suit or severely limit their damage award, assuming the validity of the patent, which I'm not.
Could someone (maybe a senator?) explain to me: if the entire purpose of patents is to promote innovation and provide an incentive to innovate then WTF does any new innovation require the inventor to spend 3 years to check that it doesnt infringe 10,000 patents? In the computer world things change on a weekly basis, can we _please_ make patents expire much much faster and stop all this stupid non-sense with people having ownership of ideas that play a totally obvious role in our lifes or where infact covered by another idea: case study: pop-up windows! dont make me fucking laugh this should have been thrown out of court within 30 seconds, one click shopping:
ME: Hi,
SHOPKEEPER: Hey Theo how can i help you?
ME: id like this and that please,
SHOPKEEPER: Certainly ill charge it to your tab?
now if you came into MY court with this patent mr amazon i would fucking get down from my stand and BEAT YOU WITH MY GAVEL! fuck you!
damit patents piss me off so much.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Maybe they might go after the end users SCO-style.
"How many JPEGs do I have on my hardrive?"
"Does it apply to MPEGs aswell?"
"Would a judge entertain a porn as free speech argument?"
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
...browsers that display JPEG, and graphics apps, like the gimp? The patent seems pretty cut and dried-they own it, this isn't a SCO vague case here, and I'm surprised the companies are attempting a defense, because chances are they are going to lose unless there's something here that isn't evident, like this company gave it away, opened it up gratis, or something in the past I am not aware of..
Sucks too, just viewing websites now with images turned on is a hassle with this old machine and slow dialup, I usually leave them off unless I REALLY need to see the image for navigation purposes or it's a news item I want to see, etc. And that's with low k JPEGs. If they were BMPs or PNGs it would be much worse.. hmm..
Would it also mean that all the millions of websites out there that are using JPEGs are in potential violation if they haven't paid a license fee of some sort?
This is nutz, but there ya go on software patents, we either live with them as the cyberworld gets more complicated, or scrap the whole notion of patenting intangibles and use a different business model with "computing", something I am greatly in favor of.
In a situation like a JPEG patent, the patentholder would want to wait until the technology was at its usage and value peak before trying to sue. That way, they stand the best chance of scaring the defendant into a quick and expensive settlement, rather than fight a behemoth on something they could care less about.
stuff |
Naaah, that's not the way to go. 1. Pollute the atmosphere as much as you can. 2. Create a portable breathing device that filters the atmosphere. 3. Have people pay for the service (subscription for beathing clean air), not the device ! 4. If the people fail to renew their subscription, lock up the device. They'll find one way or another to pay when they begin to stifle... 5. Profit !!! After all, it already worked for water. Why not do it with air ?
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
surprise witnesses, each more surprising than the last. I tell you, the judge won't know what hit him.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I thought everything on a computer was free? Isn't it just binary
- Pollute the atmosphere as much as you can.
- Create a portable breathing device that filters the atmosphere.
- Have people pay for the service (subscription for beathing clean air), not for the device !
- If the people fail to renew their subscription, remotely lock up the device, just like for stolen mobile phones. They'll find one way or another to pay when they begin to stifle...
- Profit !!!
After all, it already worked for water. Why not do it with air ?In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
With the rate bandwidth throughput is increasing, why not make png the standard? Then we can have lossless copies of our images.
When baud was 300, the difference between a JPG and BMP/PNG type was HUGE. Now the compression gains from the jpg standard is decreasing as bandwidth increases (i.e. the 0.01 seconds saved for downloading a jpg compared to a png is negligible.)
Go go png format!
I try to stay away from JPEG as much as possible. I use PNG grafics on my website(s) and for photo shooting I shoot in raw. I don't really like JPEG for its lack of quality degrade after opening it an closing it.
s/video conferencing hardware/operating systems/
s/August 2001/August 2002/
s/Video Telecom, or VTel/Caldera/
s/Forgent/SCO/
s/a video technology firm/litigious bastards/
... can turn up some more information about this
This isn't new. It doesn't look like Microsoft was ever in talks with these people. I'd guess they didn't sue them because they didn't want to get their butt handed to them by a company that gives out 1.9 billion like candy.
There's an italian movie called "Strane Storie" (Weird Stories) made up of different short stories. One of these is about a person who as forgotten to pay his montly air bill. :)
BURN ALL JPEGS!
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
...is if you could design a method to arbitrarily reduce quality before PNG compression, in such a way that it becomes easily compressible. Kinda like the oh-so-much rumored wavelets that I've yet to see materialize.
I'm not sure how exactly PNG works, but I assume it has some "easy" and "hard" pixels to encode. If you accepted some loss to quality, for the bonus of getting lots of extra easy pixels, could you get near-JPG performance out of it?
Obviously, this would be a rather major job to do and I have no idea if the PNG compression algorithm is capable of such a thing (obviously it can compress anything, but will some "leverage" significantly improve compressability?), but would someone with some clue tell me if it is?
Basicly, instead of
Original -> JPG: discard info & encode rest (lossy)
Original -> discard info (lossy) -> PNG: encode (lossless)
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It seems to be, based on the links here that they don't own JPEG, but have patented a technology that is identical to JPEG. JPEG developed the same technology seperate from them (correct me if I am wrong).
What I am wondering about is the new JPEG2000 standard. Do they own that?
Just FYI JPEG2000 is very similar to JPEG in design except it uses the Discrete Wavelet Transform instead of the Discrete Cosine Transform to transform the 8x8 pixel blocks. It is less blocky than JPEG in general.
Seems to me this is a little stupid as neither company invented DCT or even the Huffman and run-length coding that make up the components of this scheme, and all of the components are public domain intellectual property.
This litigation seems like a cash grab more than protecting there IP. They wait until everyone is freely using it (and for the most part believing it is a free technology) and then they sue the largest companies using it (hey why arn't they sueing Microsoft?).
"Take that Lisa's beliefs!" - Homer Simpson
...to their website. here it is.
Yes, Gimp is in deep trouble. Rumor has it they'll have to fork over 50% of their profits.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Portable Network Graphics
Oops, that was three words, sorry.
Cue humor spoiling joke explanation in 3...2...1...
as for the patent running out, im surprised noone (microsoft?? ;) has done a "disney" and demanded the time limit is extended to "the end of the known universe" or something
why should microsoft do so? they don't use patents in a particularly aggresive way. maybe you're thinking of IBM?
After perusing the comp.compression faq for an overview of jpeg (see question [75]), I don't think this patent, even if valid, will affect JPEG as we know it. As the parent post points out, the patent covers compression via diff's between images. (This is, as I understand it, a major component of MPEG encoding, so I'm curious why they're not the ones getting sued.) JPEG, as your web browser uses it, likely doesn't use such a technique. From the FAQ:
The hierarchical mode represents an image at multiple resolutions. For example, one could provide 512x512, 1024x1024, and 2048x2048 versions of the image. The higher-resolution images are coded as differences from the next smaller image, and thus require many fewer bits than they would if stored independently. (However, the total number of bits will be greater than that needed to store just the highest-resolution frame in baseline form.) The individual frames in a hierarchical sequence can be coded progressively if desired. Hierarchical mode is not widely supported at present.
My take is that this "hierarchical mode" extension is the part covered by the patent. The problem is that, assuming the FAQ article is correct, most implementations of JPEG decoding we encounter won't support it, meaning most people aren't going to be encoding their JPEG's this way since it would be incompatible with mass-market JPEG implementations. It sounds more like something a company would use as part of a proprietary format built on JPEG.
Bottom line: don't expect this to have any ramifications for Mozilla, IE, etc.
I am a man of const int sorrows
is getting out of hand... first gif, then mp3, now jpeg... corporate america is turning into a a joke.. i guess, as of now, people don't have much of an option, but these black suits seem to be pushing people, rather ALL the people into a corner.. thus forcing alternatives like open source to succeed... linux, ogg vorbis.. what next....
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
Given current shenanigans, I'd suggest one slight change to your post:
they don't yet use patents in a particularly aggresive way.
This is where the serious fun begins.
The abstract of the patent specifically states
"The present invention specifically relates to methods and apparatus useful in video compression systems..."
and
"Typically, the system determines differences between the current input signals and the previous input signals..."
(Emphasis mine)
JPEG is not a video compression system, nor does it use differences with previous "signals." MPEG, WMV, and before that Indeo, Cinepak, and other methods of compressing video (almost always) do.
Xesdeeni
A little clarification: PNG is actually a very nice substitute for JPEG's (especially the way JPEG's are currently being abused). It's single shortcoming in comparison to JPEG is that it does not compress to as small a size. JPEG is still a better choice for the web, for this reason, but PNG beats it hands down in other roles.
I've been working as a designer for over ten years (I started back when it used to require a degree, not just a computer). It's been my experience that JPEG is one of the most abused graphic file formats in general. It is good for the web...it's intended purpose...but it is awful for everything else. Unfortunately, everyone insists on using it for everything else...printing, digital cameras, stock art...all apparently blissfully unaware that this LOSSY algorithm is slowly but surely leeching the color data from their pictures every single time they save them. The result: Precious memories that print with muddy colors, photos with ugly artifacts in them, and unhappy designers who have to explain to their clients why there is no Photoshop cure for being a moron.
PNG's are great. They support multiple levels of alpha transparency, retain all their data, and compress even photos very well. They are a much better option for a multi-purpose format. (They would be even better if M$ would get off their collective asses and implement them properly in IE. Currently, IE treats them as if they have only one level of transparency)
JPEG's can still be smaller, at the expense of quality, but broadband may eventually make that moot. I fear we will all still be using JPEG's even then, though.
I've seen video games still using the PCX format, which is a crap format if ever their was one. Old formats die hard.
Do yourselves a favor: Use JPEG's on the web if you want, but archive your pictures with another format, like PNG, TIFF or Photoshop (PSD). CMYK images need to be saved as TIFF's or PSD's...ironically, the proprietary PSD is probably more universal.
Hasn't the GIF/Unisys fiasco tought us anything?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
"Yes, Gimp is in deep trouble. Rumor has it they'll have to fork over 50% of their profits."
:-(
Treu story:
I installed Gimp 2.0.1 and all the dependecies (upgrading half of my SuSE 8.2 like GTK glib etc etc yadda yadda). However, Gimp does not load JPEGs, the plug in simple crashes
(If it weren't so funny I would still cry..)
Cheers,
Tels
sadly, with the great legal poetry lawyers can put together, and the horrible education the folks down at the patent offices have, a patent on breathing is probably possible.
So now we all switch to machines that pump air into us
And then someone patents cell multiplying. Is that a licenced baby you are carrying, ma'am?
Patents are like property in many ways. In the case of property, to retain ownership one must defend its boundaries. There's thing called adverse possession, where if someone encroaches on your property in "an open and notorious manner", and does so for ten years, then they can become the new legal owner of the property. I'd bet a similar adverse possession argument would hold in this sort of patent scenario. BTW, IANAL.
Steve.
One of the problems with ideas is that multiple people can have the same one independantly. It's really hard to accept that just because an idea is original to you it may have occured to others.
As part of my job, I sometimes apply for patents. (Which first goes to an internal company board to be judged if it's worth the cost of a real search-and-file) I've submitted 5 so far, and even though all of them we totally new concepts for me, only one of them survived a patent search. I have to admit that when the search committee has presented me with clear prior art, it's hard not to feel some sort of stupid "you sneaky bastards" type feelings directed at the party who thought of the idea before me. (Of course, being a sane person, I realize this is irrational, and get over it quickly.) Still, it's a blow to the ego.
A the corporate level, I don't think things are much different. I can see some senior mucky-muck at a company which had been issued an overly broad patent for say, "Using a cathode ray tube to display the output of a computer" having trouble seeing the difference between reason and greed.
Sometimes corporations have larger egos and senses of entitlement than even the most arrogant people. I suspect some manager got sort on funds, heard some tech say something like: "Heh, yeah, techinically we own JPEG..." and got visions of an easy buck.
This litigaton will affect the adult industry greatly if they go ahead, with all the big sites using jpeg compression, But then the adult world is already fighting a patent from "Acacia" who claim to have patented streaming video. I guess you can't win with all these submarine patents about now days
Business Voyeur
Okay, let's say I were to develop the perfect genetically engineered strain of corn, and patent my "invention" and publish a scientific paper on it. Now, lots of companies would like to sell this corn, and any half-decent biotech lab can reproduce my work.
Continuing, lets say that I didn't limit the reproductive viability of the corn in my engineering work. So after the first few paroducts came to market and there was an ample opportunity to harvest the kernals for commercial re-sale. Every Southern States and TSC has a house brand of Overzeetop Super Corn. It's everywhere - on the grocery shelves, in the newspapers, on the web...the corn is ubiquitous worldwide.
Here's my question: If, after a dozen years, I decide to sue every maker and distributer of my corn, do I really have a case?
Naturally, IANAL, but I do know that you can lose a trademark if it is not defended. This seems awfully similar, but the laws regarding these two are different. Is there an equivalent loss of rights for a patent?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Happens a lot. And some of it is synchronicity which is why you will see a bunch of people come up with the idea around the same time. Most people never even reinvent an idea let alone invent one. And 1 out of 5 is not bad.
In his classic "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" Richard Feynman explains how he "earned" the patents on nuclear submarines and nuclear airplanes. At that time, neither technology existed. On the other hand, afaik he never tried to extort royalties from the US Navy for the USS Nautilus, so perhaps that doesn't count as a real submarine...
ForGent Networks, like SCO, gave up a product based business model and now persues the litigation business model. Such 'businesses' should forever be designated as a 'SCO class' businesses because the 'product' they sell is EXACTLY the same type of product Al Capone's thugs sold, protection from attack by Al Capone's gang, except that the courts become pawns of the business and send out the police to attack businesses. And, their employees appear to be composed mostly of lawyers, with an occasional geek lawn jockey to lend credibility to the term "technology".
Compression Labs never enforced the JPEG patent and now, with only months remaining before the patent expires greedy lawyers are trying to extort cash out of users.
The USTPO and/or Congress should outlaw submarine patents, and tighten rules to cancel patents if prior violations are massive and public knowledge but the patent holder has made no attempt to enforce the patent.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Strictly speaking, a WAV file can contain any of dozens of representations of the audio data, many of which are lossy compressions. The WAV format just defines the file structure. There is an entry in the header that specifies the audio data representation. Much of the time WAV files contain linear PCM data, which is uncompressed, but they don't have to. In fact, theres no reason in principle that a WAV file couldn't contain FLAC compressed data, though I believe that no FLAC identifier code has been registered.
delta encoder. That's sort of a 2D version of a "move to front" encoder It then uses zlib to compress the results. If your picture has large regions of a single color, interrupted by large regions of other colors, then PNG compresses great (because the delta encoder will yield lots of zeros where the color didn't change, and lots of one value [i.e. zero] will compress great with zlib in the next stage).
So you need to make sure that you maximize the number of places where the pixel DOESN'T change color with respect to it's neighbors. That and reduce the total number of colors. It doesn't have to be less than 256 or anything, but the fewer distinct colors (and the larger regions where it doesn't change) the better.
Definitely DO NOT dither when you reduce the number of colors. That just ruins it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There is the distro just for you! Take a look at Jesux
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I'm goina patent TRACTOR PULLIN' on the INTARWEB. I gots that fancy kit from Inventar's Helpline. YEEEEEEHAW!!!! We're gonna be rich.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Is it just me or does anyone find it odd using the Mozilla icon for the "patents" topic?
When the US harmonized its patent laws with the rest of the world, it changed the expiration date of a patent from the previous 17 years from date of grant to 20 years from date of filing.
Currently existing patents are valid until the later of the two dates. As this patent was granted with remarkable speed, the later of the two is 20 years from date of filing, or sometime in 2006.
Thad Beier
IANAPL
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The patent will actually expire on October 27, 2006 -- U.S. patents that were issued or pending as of June 1995 expire either 17 years from issuance or 20 years from earliest claimed priority date, whichever is longer.
Secondly, they are only entitled to damages for the 6 years preceeding the filing of the complaint (see e.e. 35 USC 286).
Thirdly, according to other stories and press releases, they did try to negotiate licensing agreements with these companies but couldn't reach an agreement. Patent lawsuits are expensive (2-5 million) and you try to license/settle and only resort to filing a lawsuit as last resort. Perhaps their motives were not so evil -- patentees typically don't want damages - they want royalties (easier to deal with and less costly to get) so maybe they just did everything they could to try and license/settle.
Finally, what is y'all obsession with submarine patents -- they don't exist anymore. If you have something since 1995 -- it is only entitled to a 20 year term from its first filing date/priority date. No reason to submarine anymore -- plus recent court decisions have applied a "unclean hands" type of rejection of lawsuits based on so-called submarine patents (see Lemelson's bar code patent fiasco in Nevada).
Just thought I should correct some of the erroneous assumptions.
Looks like he's right on the money.
You may disagree, but to be blunt, you're wrong. -tgd
May 2004 (now) to October 2004 (apparent expiration date) would be barely enough time to roll out replacement software and not long enough for hardware. These defendants don't have time to eliminate JPEG from their products even if they wanted to. This lawsuit will be about damages for things that have already happened. Meanwhile, not one piece of software or hardware will change.
While I agree that this is pretty shitty, you don't have to show due diligence in enforcing patent rights.
However, I'm inclined to think that if/when this goes to court, the judge is likely to frown on the obvious underhanded tactic employed by the patent holder. The only reason that one would wait this long to enforce patents rights is
1) You didn't know your technology was being used. If they try and use this, I'll laugh, there's now way that anyone could not know how widespread JPEG is.
or 2) You wanted to maximize potential infringment in order to maximize possible lawsuit earnings. Very likely, and very shadey. I don't know if there is a mechanism in place to prevent this.
The patent that is quoted is really broad... it appears to not only cover JPEG, but any lossee image and video compression.
Ryan
.. and other viewers that display JPEGs, wouldn't the patent apply to them, if no license or fee has been paid? Has mozilla.org paid a fee, or opera, etc? Seems like this patent would apply to them too... Look at the stuff going on with MP3 and other disputed media types and patents and players. and they have some sort of precedent in their favor, some companies have paid them for their IP.
This crap won't stop until we (society, government, business community, etc) scrap software patents as a very bad idea upon reflection.
Did you know that technically JPEG supports the ability to use a CYMK profile? It can support really any colorspace you want, but everyone just sort of assumes otherwise. I think because that full res Y + quarter res UV config is so popular, nobody (with the exception of the IJG guys) ever supported anything else.
Why do cameras use it? It doesn't make sense for a camera to use a flat RGB profile though, because all the current sensors use a Bayer arrangement where color information is not known at every pixel anyway. Also, you might have an 8, 10, or 12-bit sensor with an unknown dynamic range and gamma curve, and you can do some clever mapping into the format that can retain a lot of that information internally. So JPEG is a good fit. The other choice is to dump the raw data and do post-proc later, at the expense of being able to store fewer pictures.
But using it during post-proc is retarded, I agree.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
IANAPA (I am not a patent attorney).
The patent looks really good. It seems to cover the process of applying a DCT to an 8x8 area, then adaptively transforming the coefficients and applying Huffman/run-length to the block. That sounds like JPEG in a bottle. This was published October 1987, so when was JPEG created? The patent isn't some overly broad phony stuff.
Oh, and it also talks about differencing the coefficients between frames. Thus, it may have some effect on MPEG as well as JPEG.
Everybody say it with me now: estoppel. if they waited this long to assert their patent rights, while all along constructively assuring the public that they wouldn't sue, they have to be equitably estopped in some manner. (meaning they waited too long and by their conduct they lead everyone to believe that they wouldn't be sued, so they lost their right to sue here.)
.02
Just my
That's okay, in June and July of this year, the Unisys LZW patent expires in a number of countries around the world (it already expired in the US in 2003), and we can all switch back to GIF again :-) :-)
[I'm kidding -- people would more likely use PNG]
It would be nice to have a standard that we can count on NOT to be held for ransome as soon as it gets popular enough.
or now, my site looks awesome in Moz/Opera compliant browsers
Using Opera here, while the layout is tolerable, your site does not look awesome. It doesn't use the whole window, nor does it scale when shrunk past the edges. Also, most of the links in the menu don't take me anywhere.
1. File lots of patents
2. Don't enforce them
3. Get people to use them
4. Wait long time
5. Sue
6. Profit!
Heh.. looks like a plan that actually works!
In other news, the entire US Congress was found to have absolutely no clue as to the meaning of the words "The Congress shall have power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Forgent must be like the most generous drug dealer in the world. "The first 10 zillion are free... after that, you gotta pay!" But honestly, how many of you geek posers suggesting PNG have actually had to build a website for a non-technical client? Client: "Hey, that site you built for us doesn't work - all the pictures are missing!" Geek: "Well, actually, I used PNG for the pictures. You need a compliant browser." Client: "What the heck is ping?" Geek: "Well, actually, its a far superior graphics format to JPEG. Its losseless, and ermmm, unencumbered by patent rights issues." Client: "If its so good, why are none of my pictures showing up?" Geek: "Well, actually, you need a standards complient browser. Internet Explorer didn't implement PNG properly. You really should be using Mozilla anyway -- its superior!" Client: "So you are saying I have to tell all my customers to use this Godzilla program to see my website?" Geek: "Well, actually, yes, it would be better for them all..." Client: "You're fired." *CLICK*
planet texture maps and more
From the article:
After continuing declining revenues, the company changed its name and management in August 2001. It was then that the company became a video technology firm focusing on software and patents. Its portfolio includes nearly 50 patents. The company remained quiet about its JPEG patent, allowing usage of JPEG compression unhindered, until July 2002 when it began to enforce its patent rights after signing a multi-million dollar license agreement with Sony Corp.
Looks like he's found the way !
Brings a whole new meaning to the words: "Gonna sue your ass out of this town."
I don't care what happenes to the corporate rights to jpegs, I'm not re-encoding my porn to be pngs!
The answer is easy. If your only goal is to make as much money as possible, would you file early when the product is not widely used and people have the option of using something else, or wait as long as possible so the technology is entrenched (harder for defendants to use another product), widely used, and you can get royalties for so many years (yes, you can get payments for past years)?
My father is a patent attorney and has stated that this is a common tactic. People are only surprised at this because it is a case that has crossed our radar.
Another thing: the first groups sued are carefully chosen to have deep pockets and be highly dependant on the technology. This increases the chance of a settlement out of court (they are also often given favorable terms if they settle quickly). The 'war chest' thus created is then used to fund other challenges. The litigants can then point at all the people who already caved when negotiating, "do you really want to fight us when all these companies have already found our position unassailable?"
The morals involved are highly questionable, but it can be very effective.
--YAAC (Yet Another Anonymous Coward)
Remember yesterday?
The first two Score-5 responses come up as follows:
and now the lawsuit announcement on the next day. Interesting coinky-dink.
Who are the groups involved? The 3D Industry Forum's web site has a FAQ containing a partial list of members:
Compare to the list of defendants in the Forgent suit:
Well, from my limited perspective, it appears to me that the groups are largely disjoint as the 3D forum is concerned with graphics and the lawsuit defendants are largely video imaging and photography related. Adobe apparently has its hands into both.
Somebody else already wondered by Microsoft wasn't listed, but I'd be more inclinded to ask, Why not Sony since they are into photography as well (Digicam, Cyber-shot). Maybe they have licensed JPEG, who knows?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
...will we immediately see things like, say, a GNOME 2.6.1 release with all JPEG support ripped out, and maybe we could rip out all the Web browsers too to keep from violating the patent, and perhaps rip out the GIMP's JPEG plugin as well?
I'm not kidding; if the GNUbies are going to stick to their guns, that's what should happen.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Maybe this would be good reading right now.
So can we please have a stop to the whingers about missing mp3 in RH/Fedora.
This is exactly THE reason why it is not included - ie: even though the patent has not as yet been enforced, it still could be (and mp3 has a lot longer to sue)
And for mods, this is about as on-topic as it gets (YRO etc)
have a pop-up window that tells people that your site is standards-compliant, and that if they're browser isn't then tough cookies and they should get a better browser - and then mention that if they did, they wouldn't be seeing the pop-up message either!
you might want to run this strategy of looking for patents before selling your product by a patent attorney sometime. you're setting yourself up for treble damages from willful infringement.
With great power comes great fan noise.
http://www.algovision-luratech.de/company/news/pat entquarrel.jsp?OnlineShopId=1075701030541733420#4
(Remove the space after "...pat" - the slashdot formatter mangled the URL)
Can anyone comment on the impact this may have on JPEG2000? This, rather than PNG, seems like a real competitor for JPEG. JP2 seems to be out there in the world in a real enough way to maybe pick up steam if there is a patent cloud over JPG.
Of course, maybe this same patent cloud hangs over JP2. I don't have a clue. Does anyone else?
EOM
Bah.
Wavelet technology produces better compression ratios with greatly reduced human-visible artifacts than JPEG. These clowns might as well be tomorrow's buggy whip manufacturers.
If you haven't checked out wavelets, you're missing massive coolness. Edges between different tones are where our eyes get their best cues, and JPEG indiscriminately "blocks up" edges. Wavelets preserve edge information and do it well at compression ratios that JPEG uses to create low-rent Mondrian ripoffs.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
when I read the patent abstract, it doesn't say specificly for image. not to mention, it state in the end, "and transmitted to a receiver". I don't think I would count a computer as a receiver. The whole thing sound like MPEG2 compression for the satellite TV.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- If picture worth a thousand words, how many megapixels is it? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I agree, and would add to that: for the love of all that is decent and good, don't use JPEG for screenshots! I am amazed at how many people will do this. It looks positively awful, and makes it hard to get a sense for what the screen really looks like.
remember using it must have been about 1992, and the next and only time I heard of it was a couple of years later in encarta. Anyone in the industry know why it didn't take off better?
www.iterated.com is refusing conections from here.
Anyone?
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
A major question will be why the patentee waited so long to stake its claim.
Because they're dicks. We've seen this with GIF
1. Obtain a patent to something. (prerequisites: 1. You can fog a mirror 2. You can afford the application fee 3. You have third grade writing skills)
2. Don't enforce it until and unless it becomes a widely used standard.
3. Start threatening people and rake in the cash from those few companies that cave out of fear of the courts.
4. Profit.
5. Laugh at being one of the few people who doesn't have a "???" step.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
People keep saying that .jpeg is still the best for photographs over .gif (without question) and .png (possibly). But that's not saying a lot, because .jpegs still suck, they just are not that good even for photographs. There has to be a better (yes, yes, yes, lossy) compression algorithm than .jpeg that can be developed Open Source...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Come up with a compression algorithm called JCUNT. Nobody would sue because they would be too embarassed or shocked to type that into legal papers.
Table-ized A.I.
Patents have maintainence fees. I wonder if they paid them. I also think that they probably just figured out that jpeg falls under their patent, which makes me think that it must have had broad claims.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Suppose you are building a new piece of software:
... anyone?
... could always offshore it I guess.
- you've already searched the existing patents
- are fairly sure that none cover your tech.
How many people do you need to review every new patent granted monthly, assume:
- 30 minutes per patent to figure out if you are using something covered by the new patent,
- we're only talking about software patents
(Really anyone have this estimate?)
These people need to be law trained and know everything about your technology as it is being built, maybe a senior programmer with a law background, expensive labor
How big does your company have to be to support this pure overhead?
Where'd all the small companies suddenly go?
What happens to you if you *miss* one, and get sued. If they can prove you saw the patent and ignored it, can't they now sue you for willful infringement with bigger penalties?
Ignorance is probably cheaper in the long run.
- AndrewN
JPEG2000 is a much better format, maybe now we'll see some quick adoption.
If Microsoft added native JPEG2000 support to Internet Explorer, you can bet it would come into widespread usage extremely quickly.
Maybe PNG is a great standard, but it didn't catch up among web users, because text and sometimes images on web sites matter whereas the exact transparency of the images doesn't. If it was that important, people wouldn't mind installing another browser to view those sites. In the worst case, someone could write a mozilla plugin for IE. After all, people do install flash, Java or Quicktime to view specific websites.
I know lots of people who switched to Opera because of more fundamental problems, like popups and excessive Active X prompts. But an image with non-transparent background? No way!
You just can't do something that's patented until the patent expires.
Except perhaps license the patent, thus rewarding innovation?
Patents aren't bad you know, unlike copyrights and trademarks they're open source (you can read the patent filing) and they expire in a reasonable amount of time.
AC
Either that or store your pictures as TIFF in the camera *if you really don't care about how expensive your storage medium is*.
1. Get sued for profits
2. Declare a negative profit
3. Real Profit!!!
No pesky ??? for the Gimp!
Rule of the open mind
People who are resistant to change cannot resist change for the worst.
That's pretty damn shady... waiting for years, not mentioning a thing while your compression algorhythm becomes the standard, and only THEN informing people that you care about it. It seems like a pretty underhanded "get rich" scheme.
-Vendal Thornheart
When it expires this year we all can tell them to kiss our asses. Unless the patent gets invalidated for some reason then we can do it sooner. This is going to end up being miniature version of Unisys and there LZW patent for GIF.
We had their implied consent. They knew the world was using JPEG and by not acting to license it for 13 years they've consented to its free use. I'm not saying this legally but ethically, hoping that one day the US will have a government that's concerned for the freedom of its citizens enough to put a stop to the sorts of patent abuse that's destroying our software economy.
He was the first one to perform hybrid VLC/run-time coding of zigzag scanned DCT coefficients AFAICS.
This is pretty much tbe foundation of DCT based JPEG/MPEG/H26X standards.
Not only are they suing HP, Apple and Dell...but they're suing IBM. IBM. Now think about that for a minute. Why would anyone want to patent a with such an insanely large patent portfolio? It'll be interesting to see if IBM has anything they can use against them. On the other hand, it is nice to see companies that have been total asses (Adobe) getting sued. HAHA.
Do you keep wav files on your hard drive because they are loss-less?
:)
No, I use FLAC or shorten for my master audio files, because they are lossless. (Not all compression formats are lossy.) Or I store in cdda on cd (this covers cds I buy as well as flacs/shns I download and burn). I may occasionally make copies in vorbis or other lossy format, but never the master. (And I certainly don't pay a dollar a track for already lossy files!)
Just like the mp3 format works so well by slimming down the things the human ear can't hear
Actually, the fact that I can hear it (especially in the cymbals) is the main reason I don't use mp3 even when I do use lossy audio formats! (That and the fact that my vendor supports ogg vorbis and flac, but not mp3.)
I know first hand that the people in East Texas are particularly ignorant of technology. East Texas is still in the stone age and the people are too. They picked a dandy place...
J2K is a mess to deal with. None of the current encoders seem to be compatible with each other, probably because the spec allows so many options and no decoder bothers implementing them all. Plus, the number of options make it wickedly difficult to decode an arbitrary image into a common representation (like 24-bit RGB). In that respect, it's like TIFF, but without a LibTiff to support it. Without LibTiff, TIFF would be unmanagable.
Instead of a well-known, well-supported, competent public domain library to support it, there's just a scattering of half-implemented, unsupported public-domain libraries and a few commercial implementations that don't like to read each others' files.
J2K = far more trouble than it's worth.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Whether PNG compresses better than JPG or GIF depends on the image being compressed.
While JPEG does a better at natural image processing, I find that PNG is far better at compressing diagrams than JPEG, and the transparency support also makes it a useful icon format.
While I'm sure these endless cash-grab IP lawsuits are no end of stress for the American people, it's up to them to force a change. Or they can wait another 2-5 years before most of the smaller tech houses are obliterated by legal expenses that consume their profits.
I just can't understand the American mentality that judges it "acceptable" for stock and IP gamblers to destroy companies and damage the industry in order to line their pockets. So far, not one of these IP lawsuits has been be the creator or original owner of the IP -- it's always some vulture corp that bought up a dead or dying company just for the the potential licensing and lawsuit revenue for work they didn't do!!!
The patent process was to ensure the creator has a chance to earn a decent return on their invention -- these vulture corps didn't create the technologies involved, they don't maintain the technology, and the don't enhance the technology. They just buy the original creators IP rights as a "gambling stake" for a round of license and lawsuit poker.
Funny how no one ever seems to consider earning a living anymore.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Actually, I'm increasingly of the opinion that RAW is the best format for digital photography.
The file size isn't THAT much larger than the high quality JPEG setting and half the size of a lossless TIFF file. (Just to throw out some actual numbers, on my Olympus C5050z a RAW is 7.5MB, TIFF is 14MB and JPEG at high quality usually varies between 2-4MB.)
This is due to the fact that consumer quality cams use bayer patterned CCDs and only have one sensor per pixel (half green, the other half split between red and blue) and the camera has to invent the other two color values for each pixel and then feed that trippled dataset into the JPEG or TIFF encoding process. While a RAW is simply the raw values from the CCD, often at higher than eight bit samples. (Mine appears to return 12bits/value)
Democrat delenda est
I was studying image compression back in the late '70s/early '80s. Textbooks were already discussing this technology before then. (My ``bible'' in those days was Digital Image Processing by William Pratt (1978). How long did it take to get a textbook published back then?) It was being done in hardware by then, too. Motorola demoed real-time image compression at NAECON in 1980 (IIRC). OK, Motorola used Hadamard transforms (fast floating point was still expensive back in those days) but others were using DCT back then, though. I want to say RCA or GE (can't remember which one now) had a piece of equipment that I seem to recall was doing essentially what whould now be called JPEG encoding. We acquired some of this prototype equipment from WPAFB way back then. I know this was prior to 1982. How these dweebs can claim a patent on this sort of image compression is a bit beyond me.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
If it were a trademark (which you need to defend or else it becomes invalid) it would be thrown out of court. Why can't the same thing be done with patents?
It can. Go to Google.com and look up laches. If a patent holder harms an alleged infringer by waiting too long to take legal action, the patent holder loses the right to collect damages for infringements that occurred prior to serving a cease-and-desist on the alleged infringer.
I drink Diet Rite cola, the only major diet cola not to include the allegedly unsafe aspartame sweetener. Any other diet cola is just wrong.
Myth: Among government-granted monopolies, only trademarks require that the owner bring prompt legal action against alleged infringers.
Fact: The doctrine of laches holds that if an owner of a government-granted monopoly, such as a copyright or patent, harms an alleged infringer by delaying legal action, the monopoly owner cannot collect damages for alleged infringements that occurred prior to legal action.
Copyrights cover a specific expression of an idea, like source code or prose or poetry. You can do the same thing, as long as you don't copy the original.
In some cases, such as songs that commercial radio plays, one cannot avoid copying the original. Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976).
Patents and copyrights, on the other hand, can't be lost until they expire.
Unless laches kicks in. Look up laches on Google for more information.
"The holders of these patent rights have assured the ISO and IEC that they are willing to negotiate licences under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions with applicants throughout the world."
So-called "reasonable and non-discriminatory" licenses, such as those that apply to MPEG technologies, tend to require a royalty per copy. This excludes any software that qualifies as free software as defined by FSF from implementing RAND-licensed standards.
I keep forgetting that /. is patrolled by the nitpicking police ;-).
Refrain from using forms of the verb "to be" in your comments, and Slashdot nitpickers will have less to work with. Instead of saying something to the effect: "Wavelet and DCT are about the same thing," say "Wavelet and DCT share key aspects." Metaphors using "is" tend to have exceptions that karma-whoring nitpickers like to exploit.
JPEG 2000 requires all JPEG members to agree on RAND licensing for any essential patents they own that apply to the JPEG 2000 standard and royalty-free licensing for any such patents that apply to the "baseline" subset of the standard.
It's no wonder that so many are ushing for USPTO reform. IP Lawsuits are now a dime a dozen and all based on trying to box in users of the technology.
Under Australian law, at least, that statement is legally binding if made publicly. Which would open the black hats for imprisonment for either or both of fraud or entrapment if they were stupid enough to try that here.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
why not spell garbage "refuze" and SCOX lawsuits "confuze"?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
AFAICT it compresses better than JPEG, is patent-free, also compresses selected areas of the image [big PDF, see part 6] differently for better effect, and (hooraw!) believes in an Alpha channel and other "sideband" information.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The monopoly owner can not claim damages from when they became aware of infringement, and they initiate legal action.
They can claim damages for the time before they knew of infringement.
Strictly speaking, this is strictly bullshit. In as much as the WAV format is an incarnation of the Interchange File Format (RIFF) then yes, any damn representation can be used. But by making the first 4 bytes of this particular IFF incarnation 'WAVE' you tell me (the program): this is PCM data. From there you can have different *kinds of PCM data* (8/16/24bit mono/stereo different rates etc) but it *must* be PCM data nonetheless. MOD THAT SHIT DOWN, YO. IT AINT INFORMATIVE. AND ITS PURE KARMA WHORING.
get a clue. Wait? uninformed posts on slashdot? imagine! - proudly anonymous
Hi, I have run my business into the ground or had such a shitty overall idea I am going to litigate some profits! Sure it's not cooking the books like ENRON and MCI, but do you think I could still get a table and break bread with the rest of the vermin in the world? While we are at it I invented the internet and browser and mostly everything else!
Long live SCO and Speculative Investor BayStar!
It may be unfair, but it's cheaper to pay $50,000 in royalties on a patent that might be found by a court to be invalid than to spend $1.5 million proving it is. Or spending $1.5 million to defend a suit and have the court decide it is valid and you also have to come up with an additional $500,000 in royalties plus court costs and their attorney's fees, perhaps.
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
take a look at this. i don't know if they are right, but these guys seem to think that they don't have a case (interestingly, they sorta predicted a problem with that q/a)...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away