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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."
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
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.
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.
Absolutely. When patents are doing nothing but preventing a good (or in the case of jpeg, fair) technology from being fully utilized, they are complety useless. I would argue that they are useless anyway, but this is just ridiculous.
It doesn't make sense for one person or group of people to have control over some process, operation, or method. Copyrights are a bit closer to being reasonable, but patents just give away power that should never be had in the first place.
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?
To all the other dittoheads saying "just use PNG", please learn something or two about the format before you push it.
Sure it's open source, and that's great, but it was never intended as JPEG replacement! JPEG is a lossy compression and can reduce the size of a photographic image much further than a lossless compression - that's why it was invented to begin with. PNG is intended as a GIF replacement for images like drawings and diagrams that have large areas of the exact same color.
You might as well say to use TIFF as use PNG - both will store high color images with perfect quality, but they'll be huge compared to JPEG. Bandwidth ain't free folks - having images ten times their previous size can sink a busy website. Now, finally some may say "but PNG supports lossy compression too" - yep, it's sure does - by using JPEG compression!
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!
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.
they'll be huge compared to JPEG
I find that my pngs are about 3x the size of my jpgs.
On the other hand, I also find that I have vastly more than 3x the disk space, processor speed, and bandwidth than I had back when jpegs were first coming into wide use. So, all things considered, relatively speaking, pngs aren't really huge at all.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
What quality levels are you using? What source material? The difference can be much larger than 3x.
Also it doesn't sound like you've ever hosting a semi-popular website. Look at how many sites get slashdotted to see why conserving bandwidth is VERY important. You really expect sites should just eat the cost of using even 3x their current bandwidth? If so, I'm sure you wouldn't mind paying them for the extra hosting costs - right?
Hell, if file size was irrelevant, everyone would be using wav files instead of MP3's or OGG and uncompressed video instead of MPEG. Saying PNG is as good as JPEG is like saying you don't need a hammer because you can pound a nail in with your wrench. Sure it may work in a half-assed way, but you'd have a hard time convincing a carpenter it's a valid replacement.
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
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
"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."
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.