Slashdot Mirror
JPEG Patent Could Impact The Gimp
SeanAhern writes "A number of years ago, Forgent acquired a patent on some of the algorithms required for JPEG compression and decompression, and recently sued 31 big-name IHVs and ISVs. A Newsforge article gets into some of the details and asks whether open source tools like the Gimp could be liable as well. To add fuel to the fire, the Joint Photographic Experts Group's committee thinks that some of the patent may be invalid. The p2pnet.net story mentions that the FTC has some skepticism as well. We originally talked about this on Slashdot back in the summer of 2002."
Who needs lossless images anyway! Just use 24bit PNG! Sure, they're huge, but you've got broadband, right?
UGH...someone write a count down for the ~2 years left before jpg's are free of patents. Getting parts or all of it invalidated due to prior art would be nice, but I won't hold my breath on that one.
:(){
From the article --
NF: Would a free software program that stores images in JPG format, like the GIMP, be violating your IP rights by using JPG?
Noonan: That's a difficult question, I don't have the answer to that. I have to defer that to our legal team.
Of course, just to be safe, it might be wise for the GIMP developers (as well as all other open source image processing projects which use JPG) to volunteer to donate a percentage of their revenues to Forgent Networks.
WTF?! What revenues? The developers are getting donations and the like for the contributions they are making by working for free. This is plain ridiculous, people are putting in their free time to help develop software that will benefit everyone, and giving it away for free.
And jackasses like this want a piece of the pie? What about the good old days when knowledge belonged to the world, and people put out their works for everyone else to use?
Yet another reasons how patents are blatantly misused. First of all, its not even sure if they have the rights that they claim to have. At the very least, they could have spared non-commercial entities.
Stuff like this gets me worked up to no end.
The statement notes that at least two other companies (Philips and Lucent) are similarly claiming to have patents that relate to portions of the original JPEG standard, and expresses disappointment that some organisations are trying to cash in on what was developed to be a license and royalty-free standard.
And what has been contributed by the OpenSource community to benefit everyone else, is being made useless by pointless litigations.
Remember kids - We now live in an era where giving away knowledge and helping people is WRONG! You need to be greedy, patent all your stuff, sue your Mom and kill your neighbour's dog is RIGHT.
Will there be a www.BurnAllJPGs.com?
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Then the gimp wouldn't have a problem.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Forgent receives financing deal from Baystar in order to pursue IP claims.
The patent was applied for ages ago, and I think it expires later this year. Why would any court accept the claims of this company when they never defended their patent in the past?
OLPC Australia
..Does it entirely matter if we lose JPEG? If we have so many filters to remove the crappy artifacts left behind from JPEG, and such great formats that are worth fighting for, like PNG, if they were to come under patent, it makes you wonder...
Number one: Noone seems to think this patent is applicable, we've been over this already. The JPEG group says (in diplomatic terms) that they have prior art.
Number two: What is to be gained by going after the Gimp? Want to becoming the next SCO? Only there is even less money in the Gimp than in Linux.
The sooner we get JPEG 2000, the better. What's taking them so long, anyway? They're already four years late (going by the name).
OLPC Australia
One might even say that Forgent is going to make the GIMP their gimp. Wakka wakka wakka! - (ducks)
I would love to stop using JPEG and use PNG instead but my digital camera produces JPG only and I use Gimp to process them.
Doesn't matter how inexpensive it is if people are content.
No matter how much bandwidth you have, it is still limited.
Fight Spammers!
I'd say that people should do absolutely nothing.... by the time they even get their lawyers out to go after anyone it will be too late. This patent is mere weeks away from expiration already.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Just another reason to use PNG. As the availability of inexpensive bandwidth increases, so declines the need for lossy compression methods.
You are telling slashdotters that they should live with 200,000 porn images instead of 1,000,000? That'll go over like Steve Balmer at a Linux convention.
Table-ized A.I.
I think these patent holders are seeing a dim future for the value of software patents and are trying to cash in before it's too late. Maybe it will end up causing a vicious circle that will hopefully result in reform.
Does it entirely matter if we lose JPEG?
Yes. Most digital cameras save their pictures as JPEGs. I happen to enjoy being able to use/adjust those pictures under Linux.
What I AM worried about, is what sort of long-reaching implications this has for GD. I use GD regularly in order to manipulate images via the web, and something like this would most likely cause JPEG support to be entirely removed from the project until the worldwide patent expires.
They did it with GIF.
This sucks, because usually I've come to expect future versions of software to have MORE functionality, not less. I hope the Joint Photographic Experts Group really does have prior art.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Lets see here, the Gimp's profit is $0, so lets be generous and give them, oh, say a full 20%. So lets see -
0 *
Would you like that in Check, Cash or PayPal?
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
For me, what comes to mind is an image of the USPTO as a small roadside ice cream stand that hands out weapons-grade plutonium.
At least this company is attacking big companies that can defend themselves. I'm surprised they're not going the PanIP route and going after small companies, settling for miniscule amounts from a large number of defendants. Or would that stragegy backfire?
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Seriously. Half these patent/IP battles with stuff from the 80s/early 90s is crap - companies have some IP they claim is theres, but looking back it's been so diluted over time, pieces sold off, transferred about, and nobody really keeps records of what belongs to who. SCO think they own "unix" but they at the most (barring the novell dispute) own PART of SOME of ONE branch of ONE of the unices. Some of the SysV code is so open and diluted and already released freely that it simply cannot apply, likewise by the look of these jpg patents it's only a MAYBE that forgent own SOME of the jpeg compression stuff.
Is there not a central registry on who owns what, instead of just an initial record of a patent being granted to company X, and finding out who owns it requires looking through the transitions of different companies as pieces of the IP are sold off over time.
If everything was kept up to date AS THE SALES HAPPENED it would all be so much easier, no disputes, a nice paper trail of just who owns what.
I bet some of these patent companies buy up IP in the hope they have something worthwhile, but will never know what they're truly entitled to without it being decided by a court... and since information can be absent there, that can get it wrong
Most anything would be effected I would imagine.
... proved them wrong..
But in the end, it will be a lot like the GIF mess a few years back.
Instead of making a quick buck they pretty much made GIF irrelevant.
They thought that since it was so ingrained into the graphics world people would just penny up
Making money on ones inventions is ok, dont get me wrong.. But doing it THIS way just isnt 'right'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, generally past enforcement patterns (i.e. non-enforcement and selective enforcement) has nothing to do with the patent rights. AFAIK, if you've paid the patent fees, it's still your patent and you can still sue over infringment. This is unlike trademarks, where all sorts of things can affect the validity of your trademark (for example, if a trademark holder users their mark as a verb rather than a proper noun, it might not stand up in court).
However, there is the legal concept of laches, which MIGHT provide protection against past damages. If it applied to patents, then if a company was aware of a particular infringment, showed negligance by failing to enforce their patent (i.e. sue the infringer), then comes back much later and decides to sue, the infringer couldn't be held responsible for past damages (although they could still be ordered to stop infringing, etc.). This is all in theory though, I'm not sure if this has been tested in court with regard to patents. And IANAL.
If anyone knows more about this, feel free to enlighten me.
If you allow your intellectual property to be used with your knowledge without protecting or reserving your rights, then you risk waiving your ability to assert your rights against anybody.
The name of the game is sit back and wait for whatever becomes popular. Then stake a claim.
Just to be safe... because of course, we wouldn't like something bad to happen to you...
what about JPEG2000 (if I look at the name they are probably a bit late)
Anyone knows about JEPG2000???
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Is this actually part of that guy's answer? It looks more like a sarcastic remark of the poller.
Well, at least I hope it is....
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Because of this news, I finally got off my @ss and installed the GIMP. I had been using Paint Shop Pro, which is good and all for what I want it for, but it ain't libre. Mozilla, Gaim, and GIMP. Now if I can just kick the Windows habit.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Hey, If Steve Ballmer wants to go to a Linux convention and say he wants to donate all his time and money to Open Source because he has now "Seen the light", I doubt many people would mind...
Zed: Bring out the Gimp.
Maynard: But the Gimp's sleeping.
Zed: Well, I guess you better go and wake him up then.
The owls are not what they seem
So after converting all our GIFs to JPGs in the middle of the 90s, now that the other patent has expired, we'll be converting all our JPGs back to GIFs.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
It will at least be many years before everyone has broadband internet, and even then, serving content over the internet costs money and this is, in the end, based entirely on the quantity of data transferred. A huge web site, serving millions of images a day, may see its bandwidth bill soar by a factor of 10 if they switched exclusively to lossless compression for images. For instance, Google Image search, which has to serve the thumbnail images for search results. These are low-quality, small images to allow the user to quickly pick an image that seems interesting. JPEG, or another lossy compression format, is perfect for this.
I really would like to see an open-source lossy image compression format, like an Ogg for images, though. I wish I were knowledgable enough to work on this myself.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
The patent is on run-length coding, a widely used idea even in the 1980's, together with lots of trivial variations on the basic idea. The patent shouldn't have been granted--it's just one of many bogus patents.
However, even more serious is that the company has waited until the last year that the patent is in effect trying to enforce it. Under current regulations, that seems to be possible, but there is no reason why we should not change the laws and regulations.
We really need to arrive at a legal principle that companies need to actively enforce their patents when they become aware of violations, or otherwise lose patent protection altogether. For something of the size and importance of the JPEG standard, the company should have known within a few years of its adoption that it may infringe their patent.
Impact.
1) Equitable principles such as the doctrine of laches require that you protect your rights in a timely manner. 2) As a patent holder, you hold a legal monopoly on your invention. However, that does not mean that any monopolistic behavior you engage in will not result in breaking the antitrust rules.
Lined up as defendants are: Adobe Systems, Agfa Corporation, Apple Computer , Axis Communications Incorporated, Canon USA, Concord Camera Corporation , Creative Labs Incorporated, Dell Incorporated, Eastman Kodak Company, Fuji Photo Film Co USA, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Gateway Inc, Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corp, JASC Software, JVC Americas Corporation, Kyocera Wireless Corporation, Macromedia Inc, Matsushita Electric Corporation of America, Oce' North America Incorporated, Onkyo Corporation, PalmOne Inc, Panasonic Communications Corporation of America, Panasonic Mobile Communications Development Corporation of USA, Ricoh Corporation, Riverdeep Incorporated (d.b.a. Broderbund), Savin Corporation, Thomson SA, Toshiba Corporation and Xerox Corporation.
I wish I were knowledgable enough to work on this myself.
You probably are... or could learn. The hard (impossible?) part is avoiding the minefield of patents
it is called firmware update
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
...is less than stellar. If you'll recall, the FTC used a similar argument against Rambus -- that Rambus allegedly hid their patent applications from the standards group. While a lower court returned a verdict in favor of the FTC, that ruling was recently overturned on appeal.
Now we have rumblings about the FTC possibly making a similar case against the Forgent patent. I fear their argument won't fly if the Rambus case is allowed to set a precedent.
The MPAA and RIAA both join forces and sue the pants off Forgent for illegal life sharing.
Forgent will be appearing in a future Superbowl advert...
liqbase
But they would question his mental health. Such turnarounds are as rare.
Grade D+
I have made the following corrections to your poorly written grammar below. Changes are noted in bold face text.
BEGIN EDIT
Learn the fucking difference between "effect" and "affect", and use the proper word rather than injecting a "straight up" wrong word, in an attempt to disguise your incompetence, laziness, or whatever it is that makes people abuse a perfectly good noun that way.
Thank you.
END EDIT
Thank you. Bitch...
I thought they kept the gimp in that box in Zed's basement. What the fuck does that have to do with JPG?
Let say they go after GIMP. Can't the GIMP .png or .svg
developers just drop jpeg support then? I mean
the are other image formats out there. This
might just be the catalyst to make
even more popular.
why not microsoft as well?
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
If they need help finding companies using JPEG I am willing to help for 15% commission... Open source companies excluded of course... :-)
I don't get why this article, and much discussion following it, are focusing on the effect of the alleged patent on the Gimp. Jpeg is simply one of many file formats the Gimp reads and writes; the heart and sould of the Gimp is not any given file format, it's the painting tools. Was the Gimp mentioned simply because it's the only way someone can think of to frame the issue in terms of some kind of open source??
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
What's the patent for anyway? I can think of only a handful of things that are `key' to JPEG:
DCT, quantization, and Huffman.
quantization is just lossy scailing (how they can patent scailing?). Huffman is patent free. That leaves DCT, but isn't that just _very basic_ transform?
And if they parent jpeg, doesn't it also mean they have the rights to low/high pass image filters?
Am I missing something? (sorry, don't really wanna read through the patent to figure out... would just like to get a quick clue on what's this all about...)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
The GIF/Unisys fiasco should have tought us something.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The original company did, and waived any claim over JPEG (not to the patent, just that they would not claim for its use in JPEG). But there's no legal mechanism for writing such conditions into the patent, so when Forgent bought the company and obtained the patent, they were not bound by the wishes of the original company. It's almost the same as with copyright - the copyright holder can put any conditions he likes on the work, including 'I retain the copyright but do what you like with it', but unless he actually states that he is releasing it to the public domain, someone who later obtains the copyright can change those conditions.
I've got a really hairy ass, and I'm going to patent my design for a tool which will shave my forest effeciently, and fast.
So far, my working prototype is a lawnmower blade attached to the crankshaft of a 600 ft. lb. Detroit Deisel engine. The real trick, so far, is not making the design smaller and portable, but making it safer to use on the other side for the bikini line. A practical analogy, to this design problem, would be the discomfort associated while mowing the lawn and running over a twig.
From:Patents and Open Standards
Introduction: According to narratives from ancient as well as modern times, bridge trolls take up residence under the bridge of a well-trafficked road and demand payment from any who would pass: 'Your money or your life.' Note that the trolls themselves do not build or maintain the bridges, nor the roads. They merely set up toll booths at the bridges needed by everyone. This is an analogy: the new information highway is an elaborate system of roads. But we mean "roads" in the abstract: spectrum, wires, switches, routers, optical cables, set-top boxes, and the code which is used to transport information packets on their way from origin to destination; the code also labels and structures the messages sent in collections of packets. To convey the wagon or carriage, the carts, and young children across the bridge, the citizens need free passage and security -- protection from trolls and their tolls. What does this mean in the modern context: no tax on identity, privacy, rights, preferences, or sniffed-out-payload-type. Think: TCP/IP, a packet-is-a-packet; end-to-end transport; the middlemen collect no tolls on the use of core technologies; the code and the roads remain open to the public; uninspected and untaxed.
SCO, Forgent, Amazon etc. should merge into one big dubious IP lawsuit conglomerate. They could call themselves Sueonics, One Click Lawsuits, Patent Breathing, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
The patent is on run-length coding
Seriously? Run-length coding is about the worst compression method out there. You only use rlc when you're too dim to figure out lz77. Or maybe if you're encoding on a slide rule in real time. Decoding the two takes exactly the same amount of processing power.
I'd ask what the patent was really about, but then I may as well just read the article, and I can't be bothered to do that.
When this gets to court, it may come down to the defendants saying, "We were told this was OK, no fair changing your mind." And hopefully the court will agree with that. Yes, it's too bad you can't easily disclaim a subset of your patent rights in a more binding way.
Except PNG and Jpeg are not designed for the same kind of images. It goes beyond lossy/non-lossy issues. :)
Jpeg - lossy, use on photos (has lossless mode in the standard even though not always implemented)
Png - lossles, designed for art/cartoon/human created images.
I have a couple of posts earlier about this so I won't go into it further to save people from hearing the full rant all 3 times
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Every programmer knows that spaghetti code is bad right? Every part of the program coupled to every other part of the program. You can't change anything anymore without fucking up the program.
Now there is built-in spaghetti code in every US program because of software patents. An unsolvable mess of patents that are linked to other patents that are linked to all programs produced in the US. You can't legally do anything anymore.
Software development in the US will slow to a grinding halt except for the big companies that have enough patents of their own to force cross-patent deals with their competitors.
Patents for the protection of the little guy? Not anymore, ironic.
I think politicians in the US are corrupt and that's why they let big business' dictate new laws to lawmakers.
It's good for the EU economy that Americans are hampering their own economy this way but I don't want to see injustice in any part of the world so I suggest that you become smarter about voting in America. I wish you good luck.
- -- Truth addict for life.
Apparently paypal is a front for a global child molester network... and so the former boss of the BBC (John Birt) is being hounded by the british newspapers for accepting a position at such a contraversial company (ebay). Yeah I think it's surreal too, especially when the picture they used to illustrate the story didn't even have a paypal logo on it but did have mastercard and visa :-)
If only we could get Fair and Balanced news over here... oh wait...
Seriously? Run-length coding is about the worst compression method out there. You only use rlc when you're too dim to figure out lz77
Run-length coding is often used as part of other compression methods. I believe the JPEG standard uses run-length coding for the coefficients.
I'd ask what the patent was really about,
It really is about run-length coding. Just read the patent at the USPTO.
Good question. My first thought was that Microsoft hadn't delved into the JPG scene. Then I remembered they have Image Composer and possibly a photo editor that I recall seeing but can't say for certain.
I'd like to find out why they were omitted as well.
If you embedd a jpg into an swf format, would the problem be solved, since swf is a macromedia extension
So yeah, the GIMP should donate a percentage of their revenues. 15% of 0 is still 0 :)
Actually, the GIMP team should assign a monetary value to the work they put into the project, and since they are giving it away, that constitutes negative revenue. Let's say for instance they'll donate 15% and let's pick an arbitrary value of the work that went into creating/maintaining the software at (pinky up to cheek) $1M. That means that revenues are negtative $1M. 15% of that is $150K that Forgent owes yo the GIMP team.
It's probably better if we concentrate on finding an alternative to JPEG and not insist on believing that gimp (and open source) wouldn't be affected by such patent stuff.
:-D )
So, what do we have until now:
- PNG (doesn't work)
- JPEG 2000, part-1, ok (what's this about, anyway ?)
- What else ? It seems that there's no other option !!!
(this could be another task to xiph. maybe we could begin with one frame ogg movies
*SWOOSH*
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a flying subpoena!
Sailors. Oh man!
Are you saying the GIMP should donate ALL of their revenues, you insensitive clod??
To do list for Windows
Do you really think that Minolta will release a firmware upgrade that will allow me to use PNG instead of JPG ?
(I even doubt that the firmware in my camera is upgradable)
The period of time when scientists actually shared their discoveries so that others could learn from and contribute to human knowledge? The time of Maxwell, Ampere, Curie, etc, etc, who donateded their works to humankind and other scientists who would build on their work to increase human knowledge and increase understanding of the physical world.
This is bullshit! People have become so enamored of the almighty dollar that they figure personal profit is prime; paramount to human achievement and advancement. Fuck 'em! I will release all of my achievements to public source; at the very least, prior art will keep people from patenting ideas for personal profit.
Lest you think this is idle thought, let me tell you that I worked on things in the late 70's and early '80's that will invalidate whatever patents that many other people have already patented to exclude others from making money on them. Watch closely, you'll recognize them when you see them.
. . . for having allowed corporations to own math through the patent system. The nice thing about open source is that there will be offshore patches to defy these immoral patents.
A serious question, here. What is the legal and financial exposure of open source developers? It can't be that you escape all liability simply because you distribute your product for free, without warranty.
Oh shit if this patent comes into force I won't be able to reinstall Corel Draw 6!
The nuisance of it all!
Oh wait....
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
Forgent: Eeny, meeny, miney, moe.....
Yes i do, as they tend to confuse the dimwitted majority here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What you meant to say was "beside the point [#16]" and it's not. Any public promises they made count as a defence, and in some ways a licence for anyone accused. Probably more so under
If it comes to the worst, The GIMP will have to deal with ordinary JPEGs through an offshore-hosted plugin. JPEG2000 appears to be both patent-unencumbered and a more useful/effective standard, so I see a major effect of this nuisance being serious attention paid to that standard, at long last.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
GIMP developers, have you been tracking any project-related expenses? Disk space, power useage, bandwidth for your own machines? Time? Send Forgent a bill! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I wish I had time to discuss this, but I have my own patent lawsuits to pursue.
I am namely the inventor of the 'serif', or actually not me, but my good friend Christopher Lambert, who bequeathed the patent to me because he always felt I'd inspired him to patent the idea in the first place.
We were walking out back of my place in Queensland, Australia, and a sheep passed us by. The sheep had just - you know - and there was still a dingleberry hanging from its - you know - and I pointed it out to Christopher.
'Hey Chris! Look what's there!" I said, pointing to the sheep's dingleberry.
'If there's a name for it I sure don't know!' Christopher replied.
But of course there's a name for it. In both Australian and American. Whatever: Christopher swears he got the idea for the serif from that conversational exchange. And he patented it.
So now anyone not using a Swiss font has to pay ME. Or so I figure. But this will be in the court system for a LONG time - and I'll be in court rooms for about as long, so I don't have time to discuss this JPEG thing.
But I ran into Darl in the corridors and he says to say hello.
Make an import/export filter set that will heavily depend on NetPBM. Then they can "outsource" all the JPEG-related functions to the NetPBM package, and be clear like a lily themselves. The infringement itself is then committed by the end-users themselves, who set the import filters to use the convertors in question - which is too many people with too low value and practically zero chance to be caught. Of course this shifts the heat to NetPBM, but due to the extreme modularity of the package and wide availability of the modules, getting it out of distribution is fairly impossible, even if all the US-based developers would give their hands away from the jpegtopnm program.
fuck ip I declare the convention of intellectual property inconvenient and null. It's sand in our gears folks.
[Parent Post]
"What about the good old days when knowledge belonged to the world, and people put out their works for everyone else to use?"
[You]
"Welcome to 2004."
What "good old days"? Both of you rip van winkles act like this is something new. People have been creating as long as there has been humanity, and a lot of it didn't belong to the world, nor even a much smaller segment. And believe it or not "compensation for effort" isn't some kind of modern day invention. That fact was understood before, when there was only barter. The only majour difference between "good old days" and now is that what was implicitly understood before is now more enshrined in law.
Sorry folks, you can't have the entire planet handed to you on a silver platter. Even academics have to eat.
"Knowledge today is nothing more then a simple object of value. Patents, IP, and the whole are used as sleeper agents lately. You patent something extremely broad today and in 10 years, you fuck up everyone by sueing people left and right. That's normal these days and basically not much to worry about."
There's a difference between "knowledge" and "implimentation of knowledge". If you think of IP, and patents as knives, then the use of knives in a crime should mean that knives should be outlawed. Guess why they aren't
Also the companies that you've listed have benifited fron their IP, and patents not just from the actual implimentations, but the behind the scenes licensing, as well as the protection from profit draining lawsuits.
"(In a startup I was involved in patent lawyers actually advised against patenting for this very reason... unless you've got the funds to fignt an expensive legal case don't bother).
The myth of the 'little guy' being saved by patents really needs to be put to bed."
That's not a fault inherent in the idea of patents, but a fault of the legal system in enforcing them. e.g. he who has the most money wins. Abolishing patents isn't going to make the system more fair, but it might change the means of the abuse.
I am sure Forgent is infringing on some patents that IBM holds, like the patent that describes a process for oxygenation of blood by an atmosphere of circulating air, and an air circulation driving muscular contractions powered by a sympatic system. I wouldn't be surprised if IBM revoked the rights of the Forgent and even of its high management to such an important technique.
(to tell you the truth, even without IBM that list looks quite intimidating)
You can't handle the truth.
Thank YOU.
The "only" thing they cover is run length encoding...
The article linked mentioned this. It also mentions the patent was granted in 1986. This algorithm is one of those patently obvious ones that must have existed years before the patent was granted.
I know I was using it on 8 bit micros in the very early 80s as a way of compressing games graphics and maps. Games levels were made of maps which were effectively indices to graphics blocks. The maps were RLE to compress them and the graphics blocks themselves were RLE. It meant that you could fit quite a large level in to a few hundred bytes at the cost of a little processing overhead.
http://www.djvuzone.org/
There is a PNG brother format called JNG, with JPEG-like compression. Is it affected by the patent? If not, it's time JNG took the guidance role over JPEG like PNG did with GIF. Also the animated MNG format, IIRC, is a superset of JNG. Again, does this patent affect it?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
...so started to stockpile bitmap files. To date, I have over 500,000 stored in my Y2K-proof hard drive.
An Open Source (BSD like license?) JPEG 2000 library.J PEG/
http://www.tele.ucl.ac.be/PROJECTS/OPEN
'cause by then, every company managed to patent everthing not patented yet. and we're all using uncompressed, raw images. or paying through the nose.
A comma is not used when it is followed by 'and'. Quotes around a colloquial expression are unecessary too.
Your second response was worse than the first. Therefore,
GRADE F-
* When two sentences are co-joined with `and', a '.' (comma) is necessary to break two sentences with moderate variances in meaning, or more importantly, to signify a break or pause in context or effect. Furthermore, colloquial expressions must be formatted within quotations, or the expression would be taken literally by the reader. Without quotations, the reader would assume the writer can't "spell for shit".
Thank you,
Mr. Grammar
P.S. You are my grammar bitch. I will be keeping my eye on you. Obviously, you are a product of public high school. I am here to correct that educational neglect, inflicted upon you by the public school system.
...at least in the USA. Undeclared patents, yes, but that's a risk with every data format in the world. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A decent JPEG encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the image, and cameras aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with. Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply. The simple answer is to save the JPEG as a lossless image (like .PNG) if you're going to modify/remodify it. Then save it as JPEG again when you're ready for the final output. Okay, that's two JPEG saves instead of just one, but again it's not noticable degradation. If the image needs to be resaved after that, call up the lossless version earlier and work from that. That's how a lot of us artists work, anyway.
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to .PNG is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
Comparing JPG to MP3 is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their jpegs down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable. However,for stuff like showing digital photos on the web, you just can't see the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using. I know this because I've run a difference filter on various images compressed with JPEG. The difference is so subtle. It's not like MP3 which is compressed enough that you can hear the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing Mp3 at 500kbits to Flac. At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
JPEG is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
A decent MP3 encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the sample, and microphones aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with. Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply. The simple answer is to save the MP3 as a lossless sound format (like FLAC) if you're going to modify/remodify it. Then save it as MP3 again when you're ready for the final output. Okay, that's two MP3 saves instead of just one, but again it's not noticable degradation. If the sample needs to be resaved after that, call up the lossless version earlier and work from that. That's how a lot of us artists work, anyway.
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to FLAC is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
Comparing MP3 to JPG is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their MP3s down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable. However, for stuff like presenting digital music on the web, you just can't hear the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using. I know this because I've run a difference filter on various samples compressed with MP3. The difference is so subtle. It's not like JPG which is compressed enough that you can see the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing JPG at 99 quality to PNG. At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
MP3 is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."