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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.
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 :)
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.
"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?
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
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