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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."
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.
Forgent receives financing deal from Baystar in order to pursue IP claims.
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.
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.
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 ----
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!
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 :)
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
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
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 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.
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."