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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.
:(){
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.
Will there be a www.BurnAllJPGs.com?
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Then the gimp wouldn't have a problem.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Forgent receives financing deal from Baystar in order to pursue IP claims.
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.
No matter how much bandwidth you have, it is still limited.
Fight Spammers!
I'd say that people should do absolutely nothing.... by the time they even get their lawyers out to go after anyone it will be too late. This patent is mere weeks away from expiration already.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Just another reason to use PNG. As the availability of inexpensive bandwidth increases, so declines the need for lossy compression methods.
You are telling slashdotters that they should live with 200,000 porn images instead of 1,000,000? That'll go over like Steve Balmer at a Linux convention.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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
Lets see here, the Gimp's profit is $0, so lets be generous and give them, oh, say a full 20%. So lets see -
0 *
Would you like that in Check, Cash or PayPal?
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
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.
Umm, ya know I went to that site and something stuck out at me:
* Part 1, Core coding system (intended as royalty and license-fee free - NB NOT patent-free)
So it too will be covered by patents. Charming.
Software patents are by far the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. Copyright I can understand, patents are pure idiocy (or good business which is shockingly like pure idiocy).
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
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 ----
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.
The name of the game is sit back and wait for whatever becomes popular. Then stake a claim.
> 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)
Just to be safe... because of course, we wouldn't like something bad to happen to you...
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
Zed: Bring out the Gimp.
Maynard: But the Gimp's sleeping.
Zed: Well, I guess you better go and wake him up then.
The owls are not what they seem
So after converting all our GIFs to JPGs in the middle of the 90s, now that the other patent has expired, we'll be converting all our JPGs back to GIFs.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
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
Like someone said, it's almost impossible to write anything these days without infringing on some patent or the other. With JPEG 2000, they are atleast offering the use of all known and declared patents associated with the standard for use royalty-free. That's good enough for implementations except for purists.
Banu
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
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.
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.
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
The MPAA and RIAA both join forces and sue the pants off Forgent for illegal life sharing.
Forgent will be appearing in a future Superbowl advert...
liqbase
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.
"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?
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.
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
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.
SCO, Forgent, Amazon etc. should merge into one big dubious IP lawsuit conglomerate. They could call themselves Sueonics, One Click Lawsuits, Patent Breathing, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
"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.
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.
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.
. . . for having allowed corporations to own math through the patent system. The nice thing about open source is that there will be offshore patches to defy these immoral patents.
Oh shit if this patent comes into force I won't be able to reinstall Corel Draw 6!
The nuisance of it all!
Oh wait....
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
Yes i do, as they tend to confuse the dimwitted majority here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually, that isn't quite true. If you check the Doctrine of Laches you'll see that if a defendant knows or should have reasonably known about patent infringment (possibly also copyright, not sure about that) they can't wait a long time and then file suit. See Wanlass vs GE for an example of this.
Wanlass patented a motor for an airconditioner in 1977, and tried to sell it to several large companies, including GE. GE told him to buzz off and they didn't care and would use that motor without his approval. Wanlass sued GE in 1995, and the courts ruled that since he knew they intended to use it (and indeed had tested some GE airconditioners in 1985) he wasn't intitled to anything from their infringement. At the same time, the courts held that he WAS entitled to compensation in Wanlass vs Fedders, because although Fedders had refused to license the patent, he didn't actually find out that Fedders was infringing until shortly before filing the suit.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
The main difference (afaik without viewing the original jpeg agreements) was that in jpeg, the patent holder said "don't worry, we don't care about that patent" and in jpeg2000 the patent holders specifically agree to "royalty and license-fee free." In the former case, the buyer can say "well, there isn't any place that they actually agreed not to sue, they just said they didn't care." Probably laches holds anyway, but it looks to me like there is a difference in between jpeg and jpeg2000 patent policy.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe