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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."
Microsoft could dump .JPG (and .GIF for that matter) in favor of .PNG and .MNG tomorrow without being the worse for it.
Yes, and then everyone's digital cameras which compress pictures using JPEG can magically update their firmware to compress pictures using PNG.
PNG is the future of GIF, everyone agrees with it. But replacing JPEG by PNG is doomed to fail. PNG are so much bigger (especially phtos) that you can't store or transfer them easily. It's the same problem with compilers: you can have the perfect compiler generating the fastest code possible but it will be so long to compile that no one will use it. If you need 5 minutes to send one birthday photo to your mother and she needs 2 minutes to get it, no one will be interested.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
And now the same is happening to JPEG.
What do you think is needed to avoid such 'submarine' patent attacks on established standards?
It's because the encumbered formats are so entrenched. GIF is still more popular than PNG, and MP3 is more popular than OGG. The irony is that in both cases, the majority of people have gone on using the encumbered formats, blissfully ignorant of any issues.
English is easier said than done.
Microsoft Gross Profit: 30.12 Billion Forgent Networks Gross Profit: 3.30 Million I wonder who will win...
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
We'd all be better if O'Reilly had never published any books.
The Farewell Tour II
Hopefully, that will be a good thing.
If there is a big enough high profile case that displays the stupidity behind such patents, the USPTO may actually be forced to reconsider the way it handles patents.
Imagine - a big case that brings in all the big fellas into the picture fighting over something the judge rules to be too trivial or too basic.
Aww, who am I kidding. I should lay off the crack.
As far as I know, there aren't any patent free replacements for JPEG currently available. If this situation turns into something similar to the GIF situation, there will be one.
Remember, there was no PNG either until the GIF patents came to light, or OGG Vorbis until the MP3 patent problems started.
Compression is a patent minefield however, as the MP3, GIF, and now JPG situations show. You do your best to not use patented alogrithms, but a few years down the road someone finds some obscure patent they say applies. Vorbis and PNG might still run into this trouble, as might any other piece of software in the current climate.
In case you haven't noticed, software patents in their current form SUCK. Hard.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
As someone who has patents on laser radar methods that are about to expire. I can say I have no idea if people are using my techinuqes in their product or not. How in the hell would I be able to find out. I could not even afford to buy one of the many lidar instruments on the market and check. Even if I could, it would be hard to tell if it was or was not in use. It would be like trying to see if a certain patented math algorithm were encoded inside a computer chip in hardware. So I wait hoping that maybe at the last second I see a paper or something that mentions that someone is using the methods. But discovering your patent is being abused is serendiptous. Thus if you believe in patents then you need to put most of the burden on the people who use methods without checking for patents on them. This is of course an almost equally difficult task. The better solution might be higher thresholds for patent claims.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I hate to once again echo the Slashdot party line on this, but software patents are just BAD.
It's easy for people who program software or are otherwise interested in the software ecosystem to see that software patents are a bad thing. The question is, how are they that different from patents in other industries?
The thing that everyone always mentions is how it's impossible to develop software without infringing on a patent. I agree. There are various other industries in which this is true as well, such as the biotechnology industry.
For example, let's take the polymerase chain reaction, a technique that is necessary to do anything in the biotechnology industry. A company holds a patent on the technique, and I'm not sure if the patent has expired yet. The reason why everyone in the industry needs to use PCR is simple: The industry has a specific lingua franca, DNA, on which every development must be built. There is almost always a "best" way to do something when it comes to biotechnology, because there is machinery inside living cells that you have to work with to get things done. If you can use, for example, an enzyme that a cell already uses to accomplish a task, that's probably going to be the best way to do that task, because building enzymes from scratch to perform a desired task is outside of our reach at this point. So once someone discovers this "best" way, everyone else is going to need it for things to progress.
This is similar to software in the sense that there is usually a best way to get something done. When it comes to algorithms, it's all math, so you definitely have a best way to do something.
We've witnessed how innovation has been stifled in the software industry due to patents, but I'm fairly sure it's happening in many other industries as well. When the founding fathers gave Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries," a patent system was a good way of accomplishing that. Instead of focusing on the problem of software patents, we need to be discussing whether or not the patent system in its current for is actually promoting progress, and what changes need to be made to it to ensure that it does.
""(Forgent) is subverting the JPEG standard to extract millions of dollars in unwarranted profits," Microsoft's lawsuit states."
Sounds like Microsoft is against the use of IP laws as bludgeoning instruments to make up for lack of competitiveness in the marketplace.
Shoe, meet the other foot. It will be very interesting to see how this develops. Can you picture MS as a crusader against IP abuse?
Me neither.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
I understand the Score:Funny moderation of the parent because the image of two teams of lawyers heatedly debating something about which they are all entirely clueless definitely *IS* funny.
However, in reality, this is what is happening today in hundreds or thousands of subject areas, and the end result is nothing short of terrifying: a whole nation's progress is at the mercy of clueless talkers, instead of the do'ers of society.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that this can't be good for the country's future.