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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."
My prediction is that this will turn into a patents war, since I know that MS at least has quite an arsenal stocked up....
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
Microsoft could dump .JPG (and .GIF for that matter) in favor of .PNG and .MNG tomorrow without being the worse for it.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
PNG is fine for LOSSLESS graphics, but JPEG is LOSSY. Only if you have tons of bandwidth would you be fine.
I think Forgent is playing a SCO tactic here; I have looked at the original patent and conclude that it is not patenting JPEG. In more detail, anything that JPEG uses which is detailed in this patent was discovered by somone besides the "inventor" of this patent.
Forgent doesn't have a leg to stand on; as soon as this case hits the court room, this bogus patent will be declared invalid. The JPEG's group response to this nonsense patent.
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
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.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
(to Compaq)
If Forgent was going to sell it to Compaq, wouldn't it just be selling it to HP? Or have I been incorrectly thinking all along about HP buying Compaq, when in fact HP only bought the computer portion of Compaq? I'll go Google for more info...
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
I thought patents were for 17 years, and this one appears to have been granted in 1987.
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.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Our goal is to have NO COPYRIGHT AT ALL, until then, the GPL is a hack that uses this same fucked up law against itself. One day, copyright won't exist, and since noone will be able to put restrictions on software and other stuff, the GPL won't be needed.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
And now the same is happening to JPEG.
What do you think is needed to avoid such 'submarine' patent attacks on established standards?
At least the little guy has nothing to worry about. We're obviously not worth enough money to sue.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
The patent was filed in 1987.
A patent lasts 17 years so the patent is now expired.
Hey fcuktard, Microsoft is the one trying to get Forgents JPEG patent nullified - not the other way around. It seems like Microsoft has been on the right side of quite a few patent issues recently and I cant remember the last time they were on the wrong side of one but all they take is shit from you idiots. If you want them to do the right thing then give props where theyre deserved. If the 800 lb gorilla is willing to do the world a service by freeing JPEG then they deserve congrats.
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.
Why does the phrase "sue each other" give me flashbacks to that comic, Spy vs. Spy?
The obligatory quote from Shakespeare's Henry VI is apt in the face of the insanely, litigious state of Corporate culture. "...kill all the lawyers.", and the system fails. The path seems to be grab whatever you can, lay claim via the USPTO, who seem ready to oblige. Then litigate and hold out for a buyout. SCO seems to be run by idiots, as they appear to be failing where all others succeed.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Microsoft Gross Profit: 30.12 Billion Forgent Networks Gross Profit: 3.30 Million I wonder who will win...
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
And here they are trying to have software patents enforced within Europe? What is it that Homer says? Doh!
Deleted
We'd all be better if O'Reilly had never published any books.
The Farewell Tour II
Mutually Assured Destruction.
If the both patents are enforced, neither will make anything. Just loose money to the lawyers. I'm curious, is the bar association one of the groups lobbying for patents?
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
If Microsoft loses this lawsuit, would they finally have to make IE do PNG's correctly?
The fact that Microsoft is pursuing an expensive legal remedy instead of adopting or developing an alternative to JPEG indicates that it takes an immense amount of money to develop, establish, and market something as wonderful as the JPEG. However, on the other hand, it may just be that JPEG has become so pervasive that Microsoft has no choice but to support it, and in that case it does seem unfair that a company can continue to harvest so much money, just because they've created a certain degree of consumer dependency. Almost like a twisted kind of monopoly.
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
DCTs suck anyway. If this makes people adopt wavelet compression sooner, all the better.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In this case the patent is mainly about compression and transmission of video. So its the combination of things not just the Cosine Transform.
However a close reading of the patent claims shows that it also contains technology useful for still compression like jpeg. The fact that this is buried in the complex details may account for why it took so long for the assignee of the patent to get around to claiming it.
The interesting thing here is that Forgent is willing to sel the patent. It already tried to sell the patent to Compaq. So in theory microsoft could pull a coup here not by breaking the patent but by purchasing it and thereby owning Jpeg. The fact that it already produces a revenue stream sort of underlies that. I also know that I the mpeg compression algorithm may also be based on Fast Cosine Transforms. THere is weaker chance it could be used to claim ownership of mpeg.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
But this isn't about the GPL.
IANAL, but AFAIK about patents, copyrights, and tradmarks, you have to actively defend your rights or you lose them. That's why when these companies discover a patent in the back of some filing cabinet they bought at a bankruptcy auction, they immediately sue 500 infringers. It's not just for the money, but to establish that they are actively defending it.
What ticks me off is that someone who owns a patent, copyright, or tradmark can let it be trod upon, made part of universal standards, and essentially give up all rights to it. Then they go bankrupt, retire, get bought out, and a new party acquires their portfolio. That new party then runs out and sues everyone using this IP.
In cases like this, where the IP has been widely used, has become a standard, and no one has enforced the copyright/trademark/patent for over a decade, the patent should be declared null and void. A new owner shouldn't be able to crawl out from under a rock and start suing people.
But that would require common sense on the part of our politicians. And as we all know, few of them have any sense and the only time the word "common" is applied to them is when someone's calling them "common crooks."
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
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.
Some may claim it's not abuse... I suppose it's ot
t ml )
/ 12/0725217&tid=198
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
-----
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.h
-----
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
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)
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.
IIRC, the original owner of this patent really did create the JPEG format (or at least came up with the basics involved) but they filed this patent defensively, just so someone couldn't come along later and do this. But when Forgent bought the patent, they decided not to keep its defensive stance.
IMHO, public remarks about a patent being defensive-only should be enforced strictly, that is, put a comment in the patent record that definitively marks this patent as defensive-only and not eligible for actively suing anyone, and which cannot be removed for the entire life of the patent or any extensions based on it.
from Longhorn to Longtime
ms DOES have the option of just paying up if they lose
they also have other possible tricks availible.
i heared somewhere else in this story that the patent was expiring fairly soon anyway. Maybe this is a case of trying a last ditch attempt to get as much as possible out of the patent before it finally expires.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
So after getting stuck in litigation for 3 more years they'll still be able to extort money from everyone!
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
Abolishing copyright laws only solve part of the problem. The other part is laws protecting our rights to modify and redistribute information.
Luke-Jr
I just finished converting all my GIFs to JPEGs, since they told me GIFs were evil. Now they tell me GIFs aren't evil and JPEGs are! My web pages are going to look awful with all that lossy conversion.
I've obviously been living in a barrel for the last umpteen years. I simply hadn't been aware that jpeg was a proprietary format until I saw this article. Bummer. I sure hope that doesn't mean my digital camera will suddenly stop working with the Gimp. ;-)
This may explain Microsoft's decision to further support PNG format in the Internet Explorer 7 Beta.
My little Linux and tech blog
They never enforced it. They offered to licence FAT along with SOURCE CODE. It was optional, and not once did they go to court or force any company to sign up.
""(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.
I guess two wrongs do make a right.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
Question: Why aren't we seeing widespread use of the superior JPEG 2000 codec in software and digital cameras?
Download Opera 9 (in the BETA forum)
It sounds like you would deny this man his Consitutional right to a patent.
Inventors do not have a constitutional right to get patents. Congress has only a constitutional power to grant patents to inventors. The way the copyright and patent clause is written implies that copyright and patent monopolies are a privilege, not a right on par with freedom of speech.
You DO realize that the GPL and other Free licenses DEPEND on copyright in order to have any standing, right?
If you're referring to copyleft, which uses copyright to require a work to be distributed in a form suitable for modification, then consider that without copyright, everybody would have the right to make and distribute commented decompilations of computer programs that were distributed in executable form.
I can't say that I like Microsoft or their products. Ok... I have no repsect for the quality of their products what so ever. Well software generally. Hardware, I'm alot more forgiving.
In this situation Microsoft has my complete support. I hope they drive that other company that no one ever heard of before this out of business.
thus most patents are not aimed at enriching the inventor gratuitously but creating a value that protects further investment in the patent. This is the classic public good argument that privatization of public property is often in the public good.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Oh well, if microsoft has to license JPEG, all they will need to do is raise the price of each copy of windows. Oh No.
Your experiment notwithstanding, I'm pretty impressed by JPEG 2000. Any compression scheme is going to fall apart in some way when the data become too sparse,
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Do'h! Accidentally hit the submit button too soon.
Your experiments notwithstanding, I've been very impressed by the performance of JPEG2000 on quite a wide variety of images. Have you tried running the test images on which your code performed poorly through the JP2 reference encoder?
Any compression scheme is going to fall apart when pushed to extremes, but I contend that JP2 performs far better than the DCT approach at identical bit/pixel rates. Add to that, the fact that JP2 files are effectively uncoupled from the resolution of the original image (you can decode to whatever dimensions you want), and I'd have to say that the benefits are compelling.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...die by the sword.
An algorithm exists in nature from the birth of the universe. Humans never 'invent' an algorithm, they merely 'discover' it. So an algorithm is actually a physical resource, much like water. Since natural resources can not be patented, why should algorithms be patented? this whole 'algorithm-patenting' thing holds software development back.
This isn't standard, but i can give you this algorithm gratis, you have to put a file format on it to use it, and implement it in real code. JPEG is a bit more complex, and will give better image quality, but this is simple and definitely patent free since Fourier is dead since a hundred years or more.
comress_image(image, factor) begin
red_freq_comps = fft_2d(image.red)
green_freq_comps = fft_2d(image.green)
blue_freq_comps = fft_2d(image.blue)
red_comp_comps = throw_away_high_comps(red_freq_comps, factor)
green_comp_comps = throw_away_high_comps(green_freq_comps, factor)
blue_comp_comps = throw_away_high_comps(blue_freq_comps, factor)
return red_comp_comps, green_comp_comps, blue_comp_comps
end
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Here's a question: What happens if a patent like this is discovered to be bogus?
Surely all those companies who have shelled out $bignum to licence it would have the right to sue, for hasn't that money been extorted under false pretenses?
While this issue is not all that clear cut, how about the many cases where the patent holder is obvioulsy aware that their patent is bad?
Except that JPEG 2000 is already under patent threat from a bunch called LizardTech... http://www.ermapper.com/company/news_view.aspx?PRE SS_RELEASE_ID=356
I bet those guys will have more business than they can handle for the for the forseeable future. BSF has made $31MM on the scox, and BSF hasn't done a damn thing. Easiest money in the world.