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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 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?
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?
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?
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.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
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.
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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
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.