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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."
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.
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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?
liqbase
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.
liqbase
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.