Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Not really. Compress a 640x480 photo image to ~50KB with PNG ;-) [and still look decent].
PNG is meant for *lossless* raster art.
JPEG is meant for *lossy* "photo realistic" art.
TOM is meant for pepsi.... need more pepsi....
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It's not a submarine patent, it was granted and published back in 1987.
Well, this isn't exactly an issue of a submarine patent. The implementation has been available for many many years, and they're only now trying to leverage their patent on it, as opposed to a submarine patent which is designed around technology that doesn't exist yet, and once someone actually invents it, is used to leverage patents from them. So, close, but not quite.
[insert witty comment here]
*best* .. well, that depends on what you're measuring. It's going to give you a smaller file size. A PNG will still more accurately recreate the original. You can convert a BMP into a PNG back and fourth a million times and you won't loose quality unless there is some form of error. Except for the lossless version of the JPEG2000 standard, you loose information every time you compress a JPEG. compressing back and fourth between jpeg and bmp quickly makes something that is unusuable. If space isn't an issue, you would want a lossless format. I would think you generally wouldn't want to convert it into a lossy format until the very last step- distribution, wherein effeciency of communication is more important than perfection of information.
PNG and JPEG are for very different purposes.
PNG is a lossless compression format, aiming at graphical images.
JPEG is a lossy compression format, aiming at photos.
It's like shortening by abbreviations vs. shortening by digesting. With abbreviations, you can restore the exact original, but your compression ratio is limited. With digesting you get much better compression while still getting the important facts, assuming the digester knows enough about the subject of the text he writes a digest on.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That is trademarks
Patents do not require that you defend them.
The goal is to exploit a loop hole in patent law where validity of patent is counted from the date when it was granted, and not from date where it was applied for. So, if you've got a patent application, and you know that no competitor is even close to being able to commercially exploit it, you (the application) just slow down the approval process as best as you can (by filing papers as late as possible, by introducing trivial amendments which forces the patent office to restart the procedure from the beginning, etc.). You keep on stalling like this until you see that a competitor is almost ready to infringe: you then let the application proceed at normal speed, and enjoy 25 years of monopoly from that date on.
Say no to software patents.
Do you keep wav files on your hard drive because they are loss-less?
After a certain point, compression isn't hindering the quality that much, and the amount of space that is saved is more important than the small amounts of the quality that are lost. Just like the mp3 format works so well by slimming down the things the human ear can't hear, jpg works by blending and compressing images in way that the human eye can barely tell the difference while saving optimum amounts of space.
I thought that at least the slashdot readers would know the difference between copyrights, trademarks and patents by now.
Patents cover an idea. If it's patented, you can't do it. You can't black-box reverse engineer it. You can't get divine inspiration and get it out of the thin air. You just can't do something that's patented until the patent expires.
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.
Trademarks cover a word/phrase associated with a company/brand. You're not allowed to make software and sell it under the name of Microsoft.
Trademarks are something you need to enforce. Patents and copyrights, on the other hand, can't be lost until they expire.
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
In fact there is a version of MNG (muti-image PNG)which uses JPEG and is called JNG (JPEG Network Graphics).
This offers the advantages of the PNG/MNG file-format specifcations (transparency, meta-data, &c) along with the JPEG compression algorithm, and is meant to be a replacement for JFIF (the JPEG file image format) which is the commonest JPEG-based file format.
BTW, this story sounds *very* BAAD...
[woops...formatted now]
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
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
Wow...nothing like people quoting bad law on /. and getting modded up on it. Here is how it really works:
For patents filed prior to June 8, 1995, the length of the term is 17 years from date of issuance, regardless of the length of prosecution. Thus, you can keep the patent sitting in the patent office using continuing applications and other tricks, and then change the claims of the patent to closely match emerging technology. Also, because patent application publication did not automatically happen in apps filed 1995 and before, people would not have an opportunity to see that there was a pending patent that could cover their technology.
Apps filed between June 8, 1995 and May 28, 2000 have a term of 20 years from date of filing. However, this term of 20 years can be extended based upon delays in prosecution regarding secrecy orders, interferences, and/or successful appeals. (The URAA changed this law).
Apps filed after May 28, 2000 are given 20 years after filing, but they can be adjusted based upon on the number of days of delay caused by the PTO minus the number of days delay caused by the applicant. These adjustments are rather complicated, and usually not worth getting into (unless it is a pharm patent where keeping generics off the market mean huge money per day).
While I might be a patent lawyer, the above is not legal advice in any way.