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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.
Just when we thought it was safe to put colored pixels on the internet again...
"!"
They are putting a 1 cent per pixel toll on all JPEG images. All funds are directed towards global domination.
...to Repeat It. We all remember the problems with GIF just few years ago. We solved them changing every single image on the Internet to JPEG. We all have to admit that it was foolish. We're weak on logic, that's the trouble with us. We're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Should I not trust SourceForge then? That's kinda antithetical to typical /. ideology, as far as I'm concerned.
This has me thinking about the patent game large companies play. Take IBM, Apple, Microsoft - all with gigantic patent portfolios, and products that use many of them (and probably many of those of the other companies too). When IBM infringes on an Apple patent, they get together, cross license patents under certain conditions, and go on their merry way.
This is all fine as a defense against a company that actually has a product. But take something like these smaller companies, who only own a patent portfolio, or perhaps one big patent altogether, and no products. They find that Adobe infringes on their patent and... Adobe have no recourse. No cross licensing to be done as the smaller company has no product. The smaller company may even be privately owned, so there's no chance of a simple cheap buyout.
While we're all looking at MS, Apple, IBM, Adobe etc and going "tsk! omg!" as they acquire yet another silly patent, they're not necessarily the ones who're going to be a pain in the butt about it, it's the smaller rogues like Forgent, or Acacia etc.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...even though the Joint Photographic Experts Group tried to create a format that wasn't encumbered by patents. Where will the madness end?
If I could change patent law, I would do the following: Demand proof of damages.
Patents are designed to defend against inventions. If I patent something useful, but don't actually have an implementation, I'm using the system to stifle others, and not really giving anything back.
In order for something to be an invention, it needs to have an implementable form. Sure, I could patent something that I can't make, but if someone else comes along and figures it out independent of me, then I really shouldn't be able to sue them for having the same idea that I did, unless I actually built it.
So IF forgent claims to have a patent, their patent needs to have an implementation which would serve as a test of requiring the patent. Otherwise, it's just an idea without an implementation.
I could try and patent a perpetual motion machine, and might succeed, but if someone else succeeds in building one, they will have figured out the difficult detail that I didn't: how to break the laws of thermodynamics.
And in a completely unrelated note, XP SP2 just finished installing. Only took about 5 minutes. I guess it pre-downloaded today.
I would like to agree, and certainly agree with the spriti of what you're saying, but there is a practical problem too.
Suppose I succesfully work out all the problems and design the perfect cold fusion-based reactor. There is no possible way for me to implement it - I have to go to an energy company to get a power plant built (at the very least, a bank who will loan me the utter fortune I require to construct it).
At this point, under the changes you suggest the device is not patentable since it has not yet been implemented. What is to stop an unscrupulous energy company, or bank, or indeed anyone who gets wind of it from taking my design and implementing it themselves with no further input from me? Worse still, once they have the implementation it is they who will profit from obtaining a patent, not me.
So the "no patent without implementation" idea is flawed. It's a shame, because it sounds like a good way out. But it wouldn't work as described.
Incidently, I refused to have my name listed as the co-inventer on a patent my company wanted to file because I considered it so trivial as to be silly. I don't want my name associated with patent abuse, and if more people took that approach this problem simply wouldn't occur. That's a pipe-dream though.
Cheers,
Ian
Check the site [jpeg.org] yourself, and try to find any pledge from them that the specifications for JPEG or JPEG2000 are safe to use.
In a day and age when it isn't safe to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or put out some toys for kids to play with while their parents do business with you, how do you expect them to make such a pledge?
KFG
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.
The parasite business model. Companies that buy or create patents then just sue everyone. We've seen SCO and Unisys (LZW patent), this sort of action seems to suggest a failing in their product line.
I have no problem with companies protecting their innovative ideas to ensure their time and money invested is rewarded.
I believe that you should only be able to defend patents and your inventions if you actually produce a product based upon them.
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!
I wrote and maintain an opensource JPEG implementation, so am pondering about potential consequences. Am no big corporation of course, so not likely to be targeted by the extorters, but still.. What would you recommend, given that:
1. I am not a U.S. citizen;
2. The project is hosted on a service under U.S. jurisdiction (SourceForge).
Would it suffice to migrate the project to a non-US service?
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Changing every GIF to PNG on a site like Slashdot might have been easy even years ago when it was done, but some of us have quite a lot of important data stored in the JPEG format, which does not compress well with lossless PNG (e.g. anatomical photographs for scientific purposes). Just as an example:
It is not a simple matter of:
Well, actually it is, but it would take O(n) time (at least).
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
But wait; this uses a computer, so it's an entirely new concept... never mind.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
"I believe this is just more proof that this David and Goliath story is just getting started," said Mannsbach, who said he holds close to 5 percent of Forgent's shares on behalf of clients.
This would be some kind of "American McGee's David Vs Goliath", with a David hooked on heroin and using his sling to tie off when he shoots up... it's definitely some looking-glass version of the story, 'cos I remember the original David being the hero, not an opportunistic parasite.
{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.
"I guess the prior art does not stand in court."
To my knowledge, it has not yet tried.
I'm also against software patents but I think it's too simple an explanation to blame the large corporations only. Yes, the big organizations typically want software patents, and I see them how they push very hard for software patents in the EU where we have that ongoing legislative process.
However, I also see the major mistake of small and medium-sized enterprises: They don't act. Large corporations understand that politics affect business, so they view political activities as part of their business. Small and medium-sized enterprises are usually run by people who believe that it's "prudent" to focus on the "core business" and not to do anything serious on the political front.
The narrowmindedness and ignorance of most small and medium-sized enterprises makes it very easy for the large corporations to get what they want, and to defend it later.
Look at most industry associations: They claim to speak on behalf of numerous small companies but are pretty much under the control of a few large members. An organization like the SIIA should fight against software patents every day. It should be their #1 priority because nothing is a bigger business risk to software companies than those absurd software patents. Instead, the SIIA just asks for more funds to be provided to the USPTO. Sure, with more resources, the USPTO may be able to examine patent applications more carefully. Still the real solution is to do away with patents on computer program logic, i.e. mental steps. And where are the organizations, except for some open source and civil rights organizations, that truly fight against software patents?
Maybe, at the end of the day, many small and medium-sized enterprises just pay the price for political ignorance and inactivity. Right now, there would be an excellent chance to get software patents abolished in the EU, and that would be a signal for other regions of the world (especially if things work out well for the EU, and I'm quite sure they would because software patents stifle innovation and adversely affect economic growth).
Isn't there some sort of statute of limitations on these patent issues? If not there should be. It seems to a popular activity for patent-holders lately to wait quietly by while others infringe on their patents. They wait until the company becomes big enough, then they bounce on the offenders like a little fat kid walking through the desert who sees a piece of chocolate cake.
That's what has bothered me from the beginning about SCO (I know it's not a patent issue here, but close enough). Why hadn't anyone said anything about Linux stealing System V code before? It's not like Linux is all that new. It appears that they just waited until someone with deep enough pockets was close enough to Linux that they could attack.
There should be a law enacted where if you know that someone is infringing on one of your patents, you have one or two years to litigate. After that point, your rights to litigation would be revoked. Now it would be difficult to prove prior knowledge of the infringement, but it's better than our current system.
The patent claims the process of Huffman encoding and/or run-length encoding digital signals. The CCITT Group 3 Fax machine standard used run length encoding followed by Huffman encoding to compress the digital signals before transmission. It was issues in 1980, six years before the patent.
I don't understand why any company would capitulate when the prior art is quite as obvious as the digital fax machine. I'll wager that they've even used a fax machine in persuing their claims.