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Forgent Squeezing Money Out Of JPEG, Other Patents
deman1985 writes "Forbes reports that Forgent Networks, Inc., developer of scheduling software and holder of a number of technology patents, has settled with both Adobe and Sony for JPEG patent infringement and is going after numerous others to collect their fair share of royalties. The company also plans to go after PVR companies, including TiVo Inc, and MP3 player makers for other various patents they claim to hold. Sounds like more fun in the courts for everyone!" We previously reported on Forgent's JPEG patent shenanigans back in April.
PNG is good for its own purposes, but it's no .jpg replacement. JPG = lossy and phenomenal compression, where PNG = nonlossy and kind-of-average compression.
.jpg could get the same point across in under 100KB.
.gif, but not for .jpg, yet.
Take a high resolution screenshot with any complexity and save it as a PNG, and you might be lucky to get it in under 600KB, where a
PNG is a good replacement for
...even though the Joint Photographic Experts Group tried to create a format that wasn't encumbered by patents. Where will the madness end?
Pecunia non olet --Vespasian Circa 70 A.D.
KFG
Actually many of the GIFs were actually replaced with PNGs
GIFs and PNGs support transparency (something JPEGs can't do)
In any case many of had followed history and not only changed our GIFs, but also our JPEGs to PNG. PNG is a powerful open standard for image compression that is supported by our internet overlords.
According to the earlier /. article, the patent in question is on run-length coding, and was issued in 1987. Unless it was submarined for a really long time, there's got to be prior art all over the place. If nothing else, the Amiga's IFF ILBM image format uses RLC, and it's been around since 1985, at least.
This cannot work for the simple reason that JPEG is designed specifically for lossy compression of photographs and other complex images. Think of it as mp3 type compression - discarding data with quality decreasing proportional to size. A great tool for the dialup age.
PNG compression is entirely unsuited to this purpose - the level of compression for these types of images is terrible. Simple diagrammatical type images compress very well in PNG. Think of it as a zip type compression. Repeated elements of the image, such as whitespace which JPEG doesn't handle very well, are well suited to PNG. Ever zipped a log file? Plenty of repeated elements, great compression.
Converting GIF to PNG? Fine, you'll likely end up with smaller files as a bonus.
Well, you see it's a whole other and much less subtle deal in Forgent's case.
They acquired a patent portfolio - which includes the patent with royalty-free license in question - from another company called Compression Labs which they bought back in 1997.
Now they're relicensing the patent to cash in on it, and they're suing various digital camera manufacturers - starting with all the "big fish". They're being quite ruthless too, bragging about they're actions even.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
I tried it, 1536x1152 PNG, JPG (q=75%), JPG (q=95%).
Apart from the bigger filesize, JPG shows ugly artifacting. Note: I don't use too many antialiased fonts, and no fancy backgrounds and skins. If most of your desktop is covered by a photographic JPG image in the first place, you will find different results, of course.Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I can think of two successors to JPEG...
JPEG 2000
JPEG 2000 is "the" successor to JPEG (designed by the same team), and was noticeably better than JPEG when I checked out quality vs size, but it's patent encumbered. It is however intended to be royalty and license-fee free.
Elysium Ltd has developed a freeware Netscape plugin to make IE, Opera and Netscape browsers able to view JPEG 2000 pictures. This plugin is for Windows, and I don't really know if there are others for other platforms.
DjVu
DjVu was designed for the web to replace common formats like JPEG, GIF and TIFF. Although designed primarly for compressing text, it's very efficient at regular photos as well, and should compress similarly as JPEG 2000 (about half the size of JPEG with similar quality).
DjVuLibre is a GPL licensed open source implementation that includes plugins, viewers, and encoders for this format.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Sorry, I linked to a DjVu community page and not the official one.
DjVu is a trademark of LizardTech Inc (which also provides browser plugins for MacOS etc etc).
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
{Stupid Joke Mode:ON}
:
:
So, now, when's Xiph.org going to add a lossy codec for photorealistic picture in it's OGG software ?
And then we'll start again some kind of "OGG/Twoflower" vs. "WindowsMedia/MS-JPEG-2004.NET" codec war.
{/Stupid Joke Mode:OFF}
Actually, I realy mean it !
According to the foot note of this article,
they don't have a patent for the JPEG compression standart it self,
but for the run lenght encoding (RLE) compression which is used in one of the latest stage of JPEG compression.
Which means two things
- It is not a threat to lossy compression.
All the strenght of JPEG comes from the DCT (discret cosine transforme) and the subsequent quantization, which convert the picture into a stream of more compressible values repetitive values (and thus perfom the actual "lossy" steps).
RLE isn't the only way for compress these values,
One can use algorithms similar to those used in the final steps by Xiph's (!) Speex or by Monkey Audio (=Rice).
So one can imagine that Xiph could easily create a temporary JPEG replacement until some realy better (Wavelet based ?) patent-free format is created.
(Hence my stupid joke at the begining).
- Second thing
There's probably A LOT of prior acts for this patent, as LZW was one of the most popular compression algorithme on the old personnal computers of the 80s.
> Take a high resolution screenshot with any complexity and save .jpg could get the same point across in under 100KB.
> it as a PNG, and you might be lucky to get it in under 600KB,
> where a
A screenshot is a very bad example. It's almost NEVER better to save screenshot using a lossy compression algorithm such as JPEG. Screenshots are always better as GIF/PNG.
JPEG is designed for compressing PHOTOGRAPHS and nothing else. It severely messes up screenshots and text unless set to extremely high quality. But if you set it to extremely high quality, the file size is usually much bigger than a PNG would be anyway.
I'm amazed at how many authors of programming articles still don't know basic web fundamentals such as how to save a screenshot.
To summarise:
Save screenshots/diagrams/charts (large areas of flat colour/text) as PNG/GIF
Save photographs as JPEG
"I guess the prior art does not stand in court."
To my knowledge, it has not yet tried.
It's hard to find any kind of algorithm that does not fall under any kind of patent of some sorts. The JPEG consortium had received pledges from all patent owners that they would not assert their patents however. Then one of those companies went broke, its patents were bought by Forgent and the rest is history, as they say.
Donate free food here
Actually Forgent doesn't own JPEG it owns (according to the last Slashdot article) run-length encoding which is used in many more things than JPEG including fax compression. To say RLE is what makes JPEG would be misleading, to sue people for it would be to sue CD manufactures because you came up with the idea of making the disk a circle shape. Now what RLE is, is basically counting the number of repeating symbols, in a line, in a data stream, and replacing that sequence with a special symbol that basically says "there are 352 X's here" or "352X" etc. That basically means Forgent is not only a pile of shit, they are 352shit. Looking at the DCT algorithm in JPEG it is a masterful weave of mathematical genius as beautiful as the scantily glad Victorias secret models it purveys to millions around the world and had Forgents team of dedicated masters spent years perfecting this and had they bled their souls and bodies daily into the project i might find it in me to see an ounce of respect and maybe they would deserve some royalties from those who would use the algorithm for solely commercial gain. but they don't and they didn't. They bought RLE and now they want to milk the world for a 'technology' even a judge could understand!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It never will be and never was intended to be, for exactly the reason you stated above: PNG is lossless, while JPEG is lossy. These are two different types of tool, which serve two different purposes. PNG will never achieve the compression rates of JPEG. Just use the right tool for the job.
Would flac ever replace or eliminate the need for mp3 and ogg? No, for the same reason. flac, being lossless, serves an entirely different purpose than mp3 and ogg.
(Some time in the future, I would imagine that disk space will become so cheap and abundant that lossy compression is unnecessary, but in that case I would say that cheap disks -- not lossless compression -- have eliminated the need for lossy compression.)
"Basically, Microsoft is going to use the legal system to shut down open-source software," said Gary Campbell, then vice president of strategic architecture in HP's office of the chief technology officer, in a memo to several HP executives. "Microsoft could attack open-source software for patent infringements against (computer makers), Linux distributors, and, least likely, open-source developers."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5276901.html
(1) The mouse was invented by Doublas Englebart at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI), not PARC.
(2) Ideas are cheap. Proving that they work is hard. Edison's 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration. Rewarding those who dream up ideas without actually ever putting them into practice is rewarding the wrong people. In this case, the folks who dreamed up the patents seem to have done nothing help develop the JPEG standard (Lemuelson is another example of an "inventor" not inventing anything, and cashing in on the efforts of others), or did so under false pretenses (see RamBus).
Also remember, the point of Patents and Copyrights isn't to reward inventors and authors, it is to benefit society. Letting the creatively litigous enrich themselves while dragging down society is an abuse.
Shouldn't that patent be expiring on Oct. 6, 2004? If so, this won't be an issue for very long.
Well, according to the information at USPTO for patent 4698672, the patent was issued on Oct. 6, 1987.
So, if 20 years is the relevant term (or 17?) does that mean JPEG will be unencumbered by this patent in 2007?
Reading the patent and its citation of prior art (e.g., patent 4302775, which I think is now expired), I'm not sure what is really left of it that is still relevant to JPEG compression.
I actually used 24-bit PNG, but as I already mentioned: I had no anti-aliased fonts and apart from a few small icons no continuous-tone images. A window with bitmap fonts has just white and black pixels (easy to compress in PNG, hard for JPG); a window with antialiased fonts has all possible shades of grey (hard for PNG, easier for JPG). If I take a screenshot of Mozilla with its antialiased fonts and the slashdot home page, it looks like this:
That is, PNG takes 0.27 bytes/pixel, whereas my original post (few colors) was 0.056 bytes/pixel.Weird, there is little correlation between how much thought and time I put in a reply and how it is moderated.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Here's the sizes for my antialiased KDE desktop with an xterm and firefox open on it.
Original commenter looks right to me. Interesting.