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

Re:Honestly...

[Snover]

NO. Just... NO. Jeez... as has already been said with only 20 posts and will be said over and over again until this damn article gets archived, PNG, a LOSSLESS FORMAT, is NOT a reasonable substitute for LOSSY JPEG FORMAT.

Re:PNG

[sepluv]

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...