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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."
Then the gimp wouldn't have a problem.
-I am an elective eunuch.
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.
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.
No matter how much bandwidth you have, it is still limited.
Fight Spammers!
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.
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.
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 ----
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.
Interpretation: "Of course, if you were to give us some of your revenues, we'd be more inclined to leave you alone." Sounds like an implied threat to me for protection money.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
> Who needs lossless images anyway!
You mean "Who needs _lossy_ images"?
> Sure, they're huge, but you've got broadband, right?
Photographs ought to be stored using lossless compression anyway. Who wants to worry about slowly degrading the quality of their images with repeated editing and re-saving?
If PNGs are too huge, why not reduce the color bit depth or scale it down? (for internet transfer)
Welcome to 2004.
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. After all, the big companies in IT at the moment got in their current position by other means. Google by sheer usefulness, IBM by overpowering all mainframe competition over time, Microsoft by succesfully ripping of good ideas, etc. If you look at the Fortune 500 list, who in that list made and kept his fortune by starting silly lawsuits? ( lawyers dont start lawsuits, they just porfit from them. Immensely. )
Hate me!
I'm not so worried about The Gimp, since I typically use Photoshop.
Eh? Whether you're using Photoshop or The Gimp, you're using something potentially affected by this issue. (Photoshop is published by Adobe; Adobe is one of the companies being sued by Forgent.) But as a Photoshop user, you're more likely to pay real dollars from your wallet as a result (if Adobe has to pay licensing fees and passes those costs to users, thus potentially increasing the cost of your next upgrade). I guess your statement might make sense from a "will the product [or feature in the product] continue to exist" perspective -- but in that case, an Open Source project that is already heavily distributed isn't exactly going to disappear overnight, nor is the code for that particular feature. It might "go underground" but I'd be mighty surprised if it suddenly became unavailable -- thus the beauty (or trouble, depending on one's perspective) of Open Source.
Likewise, with GIF support in GD, it might have been removed but you could always decide to take whatever legal risk might exist and put it back in your copy -- who would notice? But anyway, you should just be creating PNGs anyway. :-)
No Laughing Allowed!
From the GPL:
Note the phrase "conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise)..."
By agreeing to "donate" to a patent holder, you might be endangering your rights to distribute under the GPL.
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.
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
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
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.
Unfortunately if by some small miracle the patent is valid, the would probably still be liable for infringement during the time the patent existed. If you do 50 in a 40 and get a ticket, you don't somehow get off if the speed limit on the road is raised to 55 AFTER you got got speeding.
Unless the patent laws work different than other laws, I assume what would matter is if they infringed during the lifetime of the patent. Hopefully the prior art claims pan out.
Personaly I think patents on software are a bad idea in general, at least under the same terms as hardware patents, the mediums are too different. If we need some kind of special patent like protection, say for a truly novel and clever algorithym, then a five to ten year protection on a very well defined algorithym would make sense. Imho patent law should prohibit any kind of discriminatory licensing in the last half of thier term. And they should be more like trade marks. No stealth patents where you just sit on it until a lot of people are using it and industries are dependent on it. If you don't call people on it when you discover thier using it, then your effectively giving them a free liscense to use it. Though I do believe simply sending a verifiable notice that product x uses patent y should be enough to count, as long as you let them know you have a patent that applies, even if you don't ask for any specific remedy at that time.
Mycroft
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"The "undetectable degredation" is sometimes detectable, or might become detectable if repeatedly applied."
.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. We don't haveta deal with crummy digital camera images.
.PNG is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
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
"Images on (some) web pages probably don't need to be very high quality (applies to both, I guess)."
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
"Lossy compression feels dirty (like mp3 vs. flac)."
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.
"Derp de derp."
The second problem is, why can't they just say, "We notice you are using our patented algorithm. Would you like to license it from us, compatibly with the GPL, for $0.02?"? There's nothing (besides maybe shareholders) forcing them to be assholes, certainly not the law.
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.
I think we need a major restructuring of our governement here in the USA. Either by force or voting, I don't care, but it needs to happen.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I think this Hollywood story is a great example of how wrongheaded a lot of IP law is. Historically places with heavy restrictions on the freedom of information (like, say, the Soviet Union) have fallen behind other areas in economic productivity and quality of life. Whatever new technology someone is trying to control in a restrictive place just pops up somewhere else where those restrictions aren't as strong, as in the Hollywood case.
I believe the issue here is that in the long run monopoly is always bad for an economy. I realize that patents, copyrights, etc. are necessary to give inventors and innovators some incentive to put new products on the market, especially in the case of small inventors who would simply be gobbled up as soon as their bigger larger competitors reverse engineered their product (or co-opted their ideas in the case of copyright law.)
However, the point is to give just enough time that you promote innovation but not too much time so you don't stifle competition (in the case of patents) or cultural history (in the case of copyright). It's important to realize that the length of time that is appropriate here varies wildly from industry to industry. In the case of software patents (we'll assume for the moment that they aren't a stupid idea in the first place), for example, the industry moves so quickly that a patent shouldn't last any longer than two years. That's plenty of time for a piece of software to grab a niche in the market. It's also a good way to avoid stealth patents like this JPEG one. 20 years for something like an image compression algorithm is just ridiculous.
In the old days, folks could easily have gotten around this by just moving to a country where you can't patent something like a compression algorithm and continue to make improvements in signal compression technology. At the same time, the country that did allow that patent would suddenly find itself falling behind in the technology world because it enforces laws that stifle innovation.
Nowadays, the big countries are trying to escape this problem not by creating legal environments that encourage having an intelligent, innovative population but by trying to force their Faustian bargain on the whole world through international trade laws (which is how the USA got the DMCA). Which is sad - instead of saying, "hey, everyone else out there is growing really fast, maybe we should grow really fast, too", the western world has decreed that the entire species must grow slowly.
And the thing that gets me most of all is that the whole IP thing is so similar to a classic prisoner's dilemma that I can't believe it isn't more painfully obvious to people. Then again, maybe it is, and it's just that the people who get to make decisions about IP law aren't interested in being better off in an objective sense; they're just interested in making sure they will always do better than everyone below them.
There's a delicate balance between rewarding innovation and stifling it. I believe that in recent years, advancement in research and especially the broadning of IP law have largely tipped that balance too far. The key issue with patents is process patents - once you let patents be granted on abstract concepts, you opened the door for all kinds of crap, including submarine patants like these. Basically, every new industry now has to deal with loads of patents filed, without an actual invention, by scumbags trying to cash in. You don't have to have an actual working invention anymore and I think that really undermines the entire concept of patents. The Eolas patent is a great example, because all it describes is a concept, there's none of the actual implementation details that would make it usefull to the public domain once it expired. I don't have ready access to numbers, but the percentage of these types of patentes being granted is growing enormously.