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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."
Because it wasn't their patent in the past. They bought the company that owned it; the original company wanted to leave the standard alone and not enforce the patent. The current owners don't have the same opinion and there's nothing in the transfer of patents that forces them to respect the original owners' wishes.
The Forgent JPEG patent issue is mentioned on burnallgifs.org: "Yes, but it wouldn't stand up in court, so ignore Forgent."
With a link to a July/2002 message by Greg Aharonian.
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'
I knew I read somewhere that there was an unenforcible patent on jpeg. I thought it might have been fsf.org but it turned out to be burnallgifs.org
Q: Forgent claims to hold a patent that covers JPEG, right?
A: Yes, but it wouldn't stand up in court, so ignore Forgent. "This JPEG patent will neither stand the test of time or the scrutiny of some good patent litigators. Any concerns are much ado about nothing." -- Greg Aharonian
Umm, ya know I went to that site and something stuck out at me:
* Part 1, Core coding system (intended as royalty and license-fee free - NB NOT patent-free)
So it too will be covered by patents. Charming.
Software patents are by far the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. Copyright I can understand, patents are pure idiocy (or good business which is shockingly like pure idiocy).
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.
And .gif already had a replacement that was superior in most ways -- .png. The only problems with .pngs are 1) not everything supported them at the time (but now most things do) and 2) it didn't support animated pictures like gifs do. (But I think mpng does, but nobody uses it.)
The jpeg patent, from what I can tell, ignores the prior art that was out there when it was filed, and so that makes it invalid (but that needs to be proven in court, of course.) That, and there really isn't anything out there that's really ready to replace jpeg.
Beyond all those import things that are different, sure, it's gif all over again :)
Like someone said, it's almost impossible to write anything these days without infringing on some patent or the other. With JPEG 2000, they are atleast offering the use of all known and declared patents associated with the standard for use royalty-free. That's good enough for implementations except for purists.
Banu
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.
This was placed at the end of the interview.
My impression is that these were not Noonan's words, but the closing statement of the interviewer... a writer for an open source oriented web site, who obviously has a sense of humor about the issue...
JPEG2000 also has patents that cover it. However, the JPEG group claims that they have obtained waivers from all such patent holders, so everything should be OK. The CORE contains 27 patents from 11 companies that have been licenced free of charge to the JPEG group under ISO guidlines, and, as such, can be used freely by anybody implementing the JPEG 2000 part-1 standard.
However, Part-2 of the standard, which contains several enhancments to the core, does contain a single patent that is not free, but avalible under RAND (Reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. However, Part-2 is not necessary for JPEG2000 functionality...I'm not sure what exactly Part-2 contains, in fact...
On the other hand, these exact same guidelines were applied to the JPEG standard. Of course, the JPEG group itself says that the JPEG patent that the article is about isinvalid, as the JPEG standard predates the patent in question.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Those "good old days" were the days when your parents worked their asses off to provide stuff for you to use.
Patent disputes have been going on as long as there have been patents - Hollywood was founded in California because IP law wasn't strictly enforced in California, (like it was in New York) and so the MPAA could get around patents on the film camera.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Except JPeg2000 of course - Its a great format - and I think it was royalty cleared by the JPEG group
"... except that the LZW patent was valid, as far as I know"
Not in the EU. No software patents here, remember?
Tels
"I know the latter is the case for copyright claims, but does IP fall in the same category?"
Copyright DOES NOT require the holder to actively persue violators. Neither do patents or trade secrets.
Only TRADEMARKS have any requirement for the holder to actively persue violations. Even that isn't a requirement to go to court, and often trademarks can be defended just by reminding people who use them as though they were generic that they are not.
IP can't fall in the same category, as it is the broader category that (according to some theories of law), covers all the others just mentioned. The written law doesn't deal directly with IP, but instead deals seperately with those specific parts. That way, there is no such thing as a generic IP violation. This is a good thing, or more lawyers would be trying to stretch the law so they could sue over some sort of unlimited time, no requirements to register, my client doesn't have to prove anything cause it's secret Generic IP violation. So far, SCO is the only bunch to try for soemthing like that.
Who is John Cabal?
They're called MNGs and the only reason
you don't see them much is because neither IE nor mozilla
support them very well... It's a very good lossless bitmap animation format though.
Yes, it's one of the more established extensions. It's covered on the PNG home page under MNG / JNG Technical Documentation.
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.
Only 3x. I'll take guesse here that most of what you store in png format is art/cartoon stuff and not photographic type pictures.
Png is designed for created images where color values remain fairly constant over sizable chunks of the image, and is designed to be lossless.
Jpeg on the other hand is designed to deal with photographic images where the colors make small changes changes fairly constantly and have some high contrast areas. It is then compressed in a lossy manner that takes into acount both the nature of the image and how the human eye sees it by discarding detail on the color level and smaller intensity luminance changes, while trying to keep a bit more detail in higher contrast areas of the image.
These two types of images don't often cross compress well. Png makes little sense for photo's unless you have to have a lossless format that's non-obscure, though there are other such.
Whereas using jpeg for say backing up scans of a comic book (maybee an expensive rare one you still want to read/view safely) isn't really a good idea because at the same settings it can take 2-5 times the space a photo of the same resolution would, all but negating the savings of lossy compression. I hate running into sites that don't know this and use jpg for cartoon images, I can't get broadband here and hate when a page takes forever to load because the "web-designer" hasn't bothered to learn to use the right format for images on page. The anime newsgroups have the same idiot problem, they post a 450k jpeg which would have been about 220k in png.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Actually JPEG compression bites the big one and is a compromise of file size and image quality. The reason it is popular is that it was free to use and that made it universal from platform to platform and device to device.
JPEG was created to save then very expensive memory be it hard disk, chip based such as RAM and Flash RAM and of course data pipelines like modems. For most uses this is fine but for digital cameras where good pictures are always desired lossless compression is the way to go or better yet, no compression at all.
Better compression methods are out there such as fractal based compression. Genuine Fractals does fractal based compression and a side benefit is enlarging small pictures to much bigger sizes or resolutions with very little noticeable loss in sharpness. Hopefully better lossless compression methods will start being used instead of JPEG.
If all else fails we can counter sue this company for all the pictures they have ruined with their lossy compression algorithms.
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.
. . . 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.
Exactly, I wish someone tell the anime newsgroups about this. I can understand that early on png support was limited. But that's just not true anymore.
Now even IE and OE support PNG directly, and as much as we may decry it,those two programs are the broswer and usenet readers used by 80%+ of the people on the web (and most others support png, many since thier inception) . There is just no excuse anymore except ignorance.
And even if lossy vs non lossy is confusing, "use png for art/cartoons/comics and jpg for photo's and stuff that looks just like a photo or your files will be huge and take forever to send/recieve" should be fairly simple to get. add to the fact that almost every image program and image viewer support both and it should be a no brainer.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Gif irrelevant?
There's about 20 of them on the page you currently reading, and it is by far the most common bitmap format on the web... GIF still seems pretty relevant in the world I live in....
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Actually, that isn't quite true. If you check the Doctrine of Laches you'll see that if a defendant knows or should have reasonably known about patent infringment (possibly also copyright, not sure about that) they can't wait a long time and then file suit. See Wanlass vs GE for an example of this.
Wanlass patented a motor for an airconditioner in 1977, and tried to sell it to several large companies, including GE. GE told him to buzz off and they didn't care and would use that motor without his approval. Wanlass sued GE in 1995, and the courts ruled that since he knew they intended to use it (and indeed had tested some GE airconditioners in 1985) he wasn't intitled to anything from their infringement. At the same time, the courts held that he WAS entitled to compensation in Wanlass vs Fedders, because although Fedders had refused to license the patent, he didn't actually find out that Fedders was infringing until shortly before filing the suit.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
The main difference (afaik without viewing the original jpeg agreements) was that in jpeg, the patent holder said "don't worry, we don't care about that patent" and in jpeg2000 the patent holders specifically agree to "royalty and license-fee free." In the former case, the buyer can say "well, there isn't any place that they actually agreed not to sue, they just said they didn't care." Probably laches holds anyway, but it looks to me like there is a difference in between jpeg and jpeg2000 patent policy.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe