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."

Comments

Why?

[Future Man 3000]

I cannot for the life of me understand why companies choose to fight over patent-encumbered formats when unencumbered formats exist.

Microsoft could dump .JPG (and .GIF for that matter) in favor of .PNG and .MNG tomorrow without being the worse for it.

Re:Why?

[t_allardyce]

PNG/MNG use lossless compression which generally means they don't get as high compression ratios as JPEG. Not to mention that JPEG is pretty much standard on the web, how could microsoft just dump it? The way I see it this whole thing is ridiculous, I was taught JPEG (DCT, Huffman etc) at university, its practically up there with Fourier and basic maths, Forgent are just milking a decades old 'technology' and the poor cow is running dry.

Re:Why?

[Samari711]

It's not lack of time and patience on the part of the examiners so much as the fact that the USPTO uses the number of patents it grants to evaluate how well the office is performing. More patents granted means more revenue for the USPTO and the result is that the USPTO is one of very few government agencies that makes money. So really the USPTO has incentive to be liberal with their granting of patents and let the courts figure out which ones are really valid.

Probably the only solution that the USPTO would like would be to shift more of the cost of getting a patent to the application phase so that they don't have to wait till the patent is aproved to get income from it. Of course that would create a larger barier for smaller inventers but should make people think twice before filing nonsense patents and also would make it more likely for more scrutiny to be applied to each patent that does come though.

Patenting file formats?

[LiquidCoooled]

I thought you couldn't patent a format?

Is it the MS implimentation of saving the file that is at fault, or am I just wrong and the format itself is patented?

Re:Patenting file formats?

[cduffy]

You can patent a compression algorithm. If a format specifies a particular compression algorithm... well, there you are.

Patenting a file format itself... well, it shouldn't be possible. but MS has done it, so in the US at least it demonstrably is.

They lost the patent!!!

[LiquidCoooled]

I just been digging through the USPTO records about this patent (its intruiging in a sadistic way), and I discovered that the physical patent file itself went missing!

05-22-2002 File Marked Found
02-25-2002 File Marked Lost
09-21-2001 Set Application Status
10-06-1987 Recordation of Patent Grant Mailed
07-13-1987 Issue Fee Payment Verified

Heres the link to the info block for the patent.

I was originally looking for expiry information for this patent, but couldn't seem to find it.

Ulterior motives

[metoc]

I suspect M$ has ulterior motives. M$ has licensed stuff (i.e. LZW/GIF) before and has the cash, so why take the risk of losing in court and making a big payout.

So why else?

One. The patent is truly unenforceable, and M$ is confident it can prove it in court.

Two. They want to set a precedent. If you fail to enforce a patent, and it (accidently) ends up in a standard that becomes pervasive. You can't be johnny come lately and start enforce it. Obviously if people knew the patent existed, they wouldn't have used it in JPEG, or companies like M$ would have only used JPEG if they were willing to pay the royalties. Additionally Forgent is charging royalties as if nobody has a choice (which they don't have now). If they had enforced the patent and asked for royalties 10-15 years ago it would be in limited use and no where near as valuable.

Re:If you live by the sword.

[Husgaard]

And here they are trying to have software patents enforced within Europe?

I think there are three reasons why Microsoft wants to have software patents legalized in Europe:

• They want it because they think it is their last possible way to fight their worst (and last remaining real) competitor: FOSS.
• They want their current (illegally issued, and thus currently illegal) patents to be legalized so they can use them for defensive purposes.
• They know that with about 50,000 illegally issued patents in Europe there will be a big patent war where everybody sues everybody in Europe if these illegal patents are legalized. This will give them (and the rest of the US software business) a big competitive advantage.

Perhaps not patent abuse, but they're pretty late

[Animaether]

Some may claim it's not abuse... I suppose it's ot

Some claim it was a submarine patent... well no, it wasn't. (Look up the definition of a submarine patent first)

However...
- Their patent was issued in October 1987
- Their patent went unenforced until July 2002

That's a 15 year gap.
I know that unlike trademarks, patents need not be enforced. But that's a change I would gladly see made.

So somebody asked what we can do to avoid these things. Unfortunately, as long as patents exist, I don't think we can avoid them.
What we -can- do is decide better how to deal with them.
I'm not one for completely ignoring patents altogether - they have their good uses, even in software.
But in cases such as these, I think that if a patent hasn't been enforced over a certain technology for over N years (I suggest 3), then I think the patent holder should be barred from making any claims to patent infringement.
I'm sure there's plenty of loopholes and problems with this, but the basic principle would be
- you still get to patent stuff
- people still need to respect that patent. So if you make a product and your patent search results in a hit, you still have to license the patent (if applicable)
- you still get to hold those who, somehow, missed your patent accountable for it within an N-year timeframe
- those who somehow missed your patent, and you somehow miss their technology or the realization that it infringes on your patent, for > N years won't suddenly be met with a patent lawsuit
-- which means that any invention that got wildly popular can't suddenly be milked for all its worth because a bunch of suits managed to twist patent interpretations enough to make it applicable to that invention
-- small companies won't be sued out of existance just for missing a patent > N years ago

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As for another user's question... what are open (lossy compression) alternatives ? There's plenty of 'open' alternatives. Problem is that there's a patent of some form behind every single one that I'm aware of. The JPEG thing, JPEG2000, Wavelets, Gradient Tesselation, Fractal..

I'm not sure if BTPC actually has any patents associated with it. However, the author claims not.
( http://www.intuac.com/userport/john/btpc5/index.ht ml )

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Finally.. I wonder what all this Forgent stuff will do, if anything, to the StuffIt guys; http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/ 12/0725217&tid=198
As they use, at least partially, a different compression (to get even smaller files).
If all this Forgent stuff doesn't apply to them, and Forgent gets to keep the patent business going, the Stuffit format may prove to be attractive to some companies as it would require minimal change in code/etc. (at least when compared to a completely different format)