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Forgent and Microsoft Sue Each Other Over JPEG
goombah99 writes "CNET reports that the long running Forgent JPEG patent claim story has a new turn. Forgent Networks has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging the software giant infringed on its digital-image compression patent that serves as the technology behind JPEG. The suit comes in response to a suit Microsoft filed last week, asking the courts to find Forgent's patent unenforceable. '... despite Microsoft's recent inquiries about licensing the patent, they chose to file a lawsuit, leaving us no alternative but to assert infringement claims against it,' stated Richard Snyder, chief executive of Forgent. U.S. patent No. 4,698,672, relates to video image compression and transmission specifically and compression in general. The underlying technology is an amalgam of Cosine Transforms, Huffman coding, and odd details. Major corporations are respecting Forgent's claims: to date Forgent has collected about 100 million dollars in payments from computer and camera companies for this patent settling on suits with 31 companies. Past slashdot stories here, here and here. How might this impact Longhorn? Forgent has shown interest in selling it (to Compaq) so it's not unthinkable Microsoft could just buy it and own it."
What good is a Microsoft JPEG, anway? All you see is a blue rectangle where the picture is supposed to be.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
A lawsuit? Stupid. Microsoft should employ the same technique I use at BestBuy. Just purchase the license, use it for a while, and then return it claiming that the salesman scratched it.
The great thing about all this is that you can just imagine both Forgent and Microsofts lawyers and PHB's in court, neither having any idea what a discrete cosine transform is or how huffman works, sitting their yawning and listening to engineer testimonies while the judge tries to figure what the fuck is going on.
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At least the little guy has nothing to worry about. We're obviously not worth enough money to sue.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
That was the most incoherent string of purported thoughts that has ever been posted to the international headquarters of poorly thought out rants that is Slashdot. You managed to denounce patents, copyright, Microsoft, Amazon, and the RIAA; your spelling is atrocious; and your entire post is entirely irrelevant. On the whole, it is without precident in Slashdot history outside of some of the wittier GNAA posts.
In other words, you win Slashdot.
If Microsoft loses this lawsuit, would they finally have to make IE do PNG's correctly?
The only ones that would have a problem with graphics in the PNG format are the stupid dial-up users. Personally, I think all websites should start using graphics in the PNG fortmat, and the size for each image should be from 300KiB on up. The fucktards that are stuck with dial-up, well that's their own damned problem.
Wouldn't that be sweet, a site that is a total of 3MiB, It would take a broadband user only a few seconds, while a dial-up user it would take at least 10 Min for the page to load, that would force them to either upgrade, wait for the page to load, or just get off the fucking internet. no matter what the choice is, problem solved through natural selection.
MNG. Friggen Google it. Who cares if it ain't well known - another patent war would be just push this spec needs.
/. stock tips.
Hey, that Googling was a great idea! Miramar Mining was up 5.15% just Friday, putting it back over the dollar mark. I can only assume it's because they have a dog in this JPEG format patent fight.
Gotta read between the lines, folks. Man, I love me some
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.