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."

Comments

Re:Still applicable?

[Doctor7]

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.

Re:gif all over again

[dougmc]

gif all over again

... except that the LZW patent was valid, as far as I know. It's not nice that they said they would not pursue the patent and then changed their mind, but that's beside the fact.

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 :)

Re:This is a very bad trend

[spiritraveller]

Actually, the Newsforge page looks more like this:

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...

Re:This is a very bad trend

[mcrbids]

What about the good old days when knowledge belonged to the world, and people put out their works for everyone else to use?

You know the good ole days weren't always good
And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems
-Billy Joel

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.