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."

Comments

Submarine patents?

[Keith_Beef]

I thought there was some specific legislation to stop "submarine patents" like this?

Beefy.

Re:Submarine patents?

[jimicus]

Submarine patent or not, they've essentially sat on it until well after it became a de-facto standard and only now started suing people. 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?

Re:Submarine patents?

[squiggleslash]

It's not a submarine patent, and the grandparent seems to have missed the point because this is far more interesting.

Forgive me, because I can't find a link right now that includes the full story, this is from memory, but what essentially has happened is that a "white hat" patenteer has been bought by a "black hat" patenteer. The original company that patented this particular system made it clear from the start that they would not persue the patent for people who are merely using it in JPEGs. However, this never had the force of law.

That company no longer exists, its patent portfolio is with a new company that has no such qualms and has never made such a promise. That company, Compression Labs, is enforcing the patent.

Re:Submarine patents?

[raga]

This is not a submarine patent. However, Forgent may be on shaky grounds as far as collection of huge amounts of license fee is concerned. The JPEG Committee specifically states that "Specifically, SC 29 affirms the ISO policy of only considering technology that is free of "IP rights" or which is available on a royalty and license fee free basis or which is available under reasonable terms and conditions on a non-discriminatory basis." (IANAL:)Checkout this page.

"WG 1 requires all participants within all National Bodies to disclose and identify any and all patent rights and the specific technologies within the Verification Model to which they apply. Further, WG 1 requires this disclosure and identification at the time of submission of technology for VM consideration if submitted by the patent holder or no later than one meeting after submission of technology if the technology is not submitted by the patent holder. Further, WG 1 requires that the form contained in WG 1 N1267 be completed as part of this disclosure. This request is in accordance with ISO/IEC directives Part II, Annex A, Section A.2. ...
"SC 29 affirms and supports ISO policy that requires disclosure of the existence of Intellectual Property (IP) rights or pending rights (such as patents or pending patent applications), hereafter referred to as "IP rights", associated with any technology submitted to SC 29/WGs for consideration for inclusion in any ISO/IEC standard. Specifically, SC 29 affirms the ISO policy of only considering technology that is free of "IP rights" or which is available on a royalty and license fee free basis or which is available under reasonable terms and conditions on a non-discriminatory basis. " ...
In 2002, it became widely publicised that one or more companies were making claims in some countries that they had patents which they believed read on the original JPEG standard IS10918-1. The JPEG Committee produces standards, which have a global basis, and are unable to comment on the validity of such claims, or potential infringement by particular implementations within specific jurisdictions. No such claims have (at January 2004) been registered formally through the appropriate channels at ISO and ITU-T, so far as the Webmaster is aware. In an attempt to provide as much technical background as possible to assist companies approached concerning such patent claims, JPEG have assembled a Historical Archive of as much material as possible, which helps show how decisions were taken, what the technical inputs were behind those decisions, and some of the background information concerning the involvement of companies and individuals in the standardisation process. These are currently provided without further commentary as a service to members of the JPEG committee only, primarily for copyright reasons.

cheers- raga

PNG

[millwall]

Maybe this will be a call for everyone to switch to PNG.

Re:PNG

[j-turkey]

JPG is still the best image format for photographs.

Why do you say that JPEG is the best image format for photographs? Because it's so widely used? JPEG is a lossy format -- regardless of what you do with it. PNG looks far better, although it's not as well compressed. However, with storage technology where it is, wouldn't you want your photos to start off in a lossless format -- then compress it down with some lossy compression scheme later?

Re:PNG

[DarkSarin]

Yeah, well we all Know why we don't use png. I am working on a new layout for my website that calls for the heavy use of pngs (due to transparency), but when I showed it to a web-savvy friend he asked why not use GIF.

My point is that many people are still unaware of why PNG is better, despite having more than adequate time to become educated.

The real trouble is that microsoft still hasn't fixed png support, and the hacks, such as IE7 (by dean edwards) and sleight (www.skyzyx.com) aren't perfect.

For now, my site looks awesome in Moz/Opera compliant browsers, but only so-so in IE, and its a fully w3c compliant site.

JPG's are also useful in their own right, but lack certain features that make png's better. Interestingly enough, PNG's do well enough with photos for my admittedly low standards.

Gimp

[millahtime]

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?

Interesting omission

[d60b9y]

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?

Why you'd wait to file suit

[192939495969798999]

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.

JPEG, JPEG2000, and frivolous lawsuits.

[!ucif3r]

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?).

A SCO business model

[Jerry]

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.

Interesting

[whovian]

Some more digging...

Remember yesterday? /. had a thread about working on a Universal 3D file format wherein it was mentioned that MP3 and JPEG as models for comparison were encumbered with patent issues.

The first two Score-5 responses come up as follows:

Really bad examples to pick... (Score:5, Insightful)
by * on Wednesday April 21, @03:26PM (#8933019)
(http://www.studioqb.com/)
Not only did they pick two lossy formats to use as examples, both MP3 [mp3licensing.com] and JPEG [forgent.com] are patent-encumbered formats. (The validity of the Forgent patent on a piece of JPEG is a bit of a still-contested issue... but I'll leave that to others to discuss.) If you want to write a program using either of those formats, you're going to have to pay the toll.

Let's hope U3D is able to stay clear of such entanglements. Having a patent involved in a file format makes it questionable if FOSS can legally use the format.

JPEG patent is bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
by * on Wednesday April 21, @03:29PM (#8933064)

You have a point with MP3, but the author of BurnAllGIFs.org [burnallgifs.org] seems to think the JPEG patent wouldn't stand up in a court of law.

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:

Adobe, Boeing, Dassault/Systemes, NGRAIN, Lattice, Microsoft, Parallel Graphics, SGDL Systems and Tech Soft. [and Intel presumably as they called for the Forum].

Compare to the list of defendants in the Forgent suit:

Adobe, Agfa, Apple, Axis Communications, Canon, Concord Camera Corporation, Creative Labs, Dell, Kodak, Fuji Photo Film, Fujitsu CPoA, Gateway, HP, IBM, JASC Software, JVC Americas Corp., Kyocera, Macromedia, Matsushita, Oce' North America, Onkyo, PalmOne, Panasonic, Ricoh, Broderbund, Savin, Thomson S.A., Toshiba, Xerox.

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?