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

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?

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.