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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."
UGH...someone write a count down for the ~2 years left before jpg's are free of patents. Getting parts or all of it invalidated due to prior art would be nice, but I won't hold my breath on that one.
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From the article --
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.
WTF?! What revenues? The developers are getting donations and the like for the contributions they are making by working for free. This is plain ridiculous, people are putting in their free time to help develop software that will benefit everyone, and giving it away for free.
And jackasses like this want a piece of the pie? What about the good old days when knowledge belonged to the world, and people put out their works for everyone else to use?
Yet another reasons how patents are blatantly misused. First of all, its not even sure if they have the rights that they claim to have. At the very least, they could have spared non-commercial entities.
Stuff like this gets me worked up to no end.
The statement notes that at least two other companies (Philips and Lucent) are similarly claiming to have patents that relate to portions of the original JPEG standard, and expresses disappointment that some organisations are trying to cash in on what was developed to be a license and royalty-free standard.
And what has been contributed by the OpenSource community to benefit everyone else, is being made useless by pointless litigations.
Remember kids - We now live in an era where giving away knowledge and helping people is WRONG! You need to be greedy, patent all your stuff, sue your Mom and kill your neighbour's dog is RIGHT.
I think these patent holders are seeing a dim future for the value of software patents and are trying to cash in before it's too late. Maybe it will end up causing a vicious circle that will hopefully result in reform.
What I AM worried about, is what sort of long-reaching implications this has for GD. I use GD regularly in order to manipulate images via the web, and something like this would most likely cause JPEG support to be entirely removed from the project until the worldwide patent expires.
They did it with GIF.
This sucks, because usually I've come to expect future versions of software to have MORE functionality, not less. I hope the Joint Photographic Experts Group really does have prior art.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Seriously. Half these patent/IP battles with stuff from the 80s/early 90s is crap - companies have some IP they claim is theres, but looking back it's been so diluted over time, pieces sold off, transferred about, and nobody really keeps records of what belongs to who. SCO think they own "unix" but they at the most (barring the novell dispute) own PART of SOME of ONE branch of ONE of the unices. Some of the SysV code is so open and diluted and already released freely that it simply cannot apply, likewise by the look of these jpg patents it's only a MAYBE that forgent own SOME of the jpeg compression stuff.
Is there not a central registry on who owns what, instead of just an initial record of a patent being granted to company X, and finding out who owns it requires looking through the transitions of different companies as pieces of the IP are sold off over time.
If everything was kept up to date AS THE SALES HAPPENED it would all be so much easier, no disputes, a nice paper trail of just who owns what.
I bet some of these patent companies buy up IP in the hope they have something worthwhile, but will never know what they're truly entitled to without it being decided by a court... and since information can be absent there, that can get it wrong
The name of the game is sit back and wait for whatever becomes popular. Then stake a claim.
Is this actually part of that guy's answer? It looks more like a sarcastic remark of the poller.
Well, at least I hope it is....
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
If the original owners let the patent "leak" into the public domain (effectively, per the Doctrine of Laches), then such would be the condition of the patent as purchased by the new company. The patent's virginity wouldn't reinstate any more than Britney's.
(But IANAL, dammit.)
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
Lined up as defendants are: Adobe Systems, Agfa Corporation, Apple Computer , Axis Communications Incorporated, Canon USA, Concord Camera Corporation , Creative Labs Incorporated, Dell Incorporated, Eastman Kodak Company, Fuji Photo Film Co USA, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Gateway Inc, Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corp, JASC Software, JVC Americas Corporation, Kyocera Wireless Corporation, Macromedia Inc, Matsushita Electric Corporation of America, Oce' North America Incorporated, Onkyo Corporation, PalmOne Inc, Panasonic Communications Corporation of America, Panasonic Mobile Communications Development Corporation of USA, Ricoh Corporation, Riverdeep Incorporated (d.b.a. Broderbund), Savin Corporation, Thomson SA, Toshiba Corporation and Xerox Corporation.
What's the patent for anyway? I can think of only a handful of things that are `key' to JPEG:
DCT, quantization, and Huffman.
quantization is just lossy scailing (how they can patent scailing?). Huffman is patent free. That leaves DCT, but isn't that just _very basic_ transform?
And if they parent jpeg, doesn't it also mean they have the rights to low/high pass image filters?
Am I missing something? (sorry, don't really wanna read through the patent to figure out... would just like to get a quick clue on what's this all about...)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
If they were a small underfunded startup they could *still* have been wiped out by a pet project of Microsoft or Sony.
Lets say they violated your patent. What are you going to do about it? You're underfunded already, and suing Microsoft is not a good business move. You'd be bankcrupt long before the case came to court.
(In a startup I was involved in patent lawyers actually advised against patenting for this very reason... unless you've got the funds to fignt an expensive legal case don't bother).
The myth of the 'little guy' being saved by patents really needs to be put to bed.
When this gets to court, it may come down to the defendants saying, "We were told this was OK, no fair changing your mind." And hopefully the court will agree with that. Yes, it's too bad you can't easily disclaim a subset of your patent rights in a more binding way.
So yeah, the GIMP should donate a percentage of their revenues. 15% of 0 is still 0 :)
Actually, the GIMP team should assign a monetary value to the work they put into the project, and since they are giving it away, that constitutes negative revenue. Let's say for instance they'll donate 15% and let's pick an arbitrary value of the work that went into creating/maintaining the software at (pinky up to cheek) $1M. That means that revenues are negtative $1M. 15% of that is $150K that Forgent owes yo the GIMP team.