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JPEG Patent Challenged
ChocLinux writes "The Public Patent Foundation has filed a request at the US Patent Office to revoke Compression Labs' data compression patent, which it is reportedly using to harrass anyone that implements the JPEG format. 'CLI's aggressive assertion of the '672 patent is causing substantial public harm by threatening this international standard on which the public relies,' says Pubpat in its filing."
then beware of geeks bearing GIFs.
Who wasted time chasing this while nearly putting themselves out of business. How about focusing on some real products???
Get this patent overturned. It's extremely important to get these ridiculous technology stifling unoriginal patents overturned.
Where the hell is EFF on this? Pubpatents is getting my money this year and I recommend you guys donate there as well if you are into donating to tech freedom.
They better not start suing the guys behind the GIMP, or I'll have PWN3D!!1 pictures of the CLI execs up here by cross-examination time.
...in the much-less-encumbered PNG format of course.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
... was the prior art in JPEG format?
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Is it possible that if JPEG patents were enforced we would actually persue the use a PNG (a significantly better format). As a web developer, if I could rely on people being able to see all the different derivations of PNG, life and design would be much easier.
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
Didn't the enforcement of the GIF patent lead to the development of the (generally better, in my experience) PNG format? If we suddenly can use JPGs freely, then somebody will come out with another, possibly better, format for everyone to use.
Compression Lab Inc:
"All your pr0n are belongs to us"
persue = pursue
the use a = the use of
Neither PNG *nor* JPEG have spell and grammar check. *sigh*
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
And go home compression labs!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Apparently they don't have the balls to risk real money. By enforcing their IP, they force the "offender" to pay them or risk paying more; CLI would win either way. With a real product, they might win or lose.
So much for businesses with self-esteem...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
RTFA
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
This is covered in details over at Groklaw
Help fight continental drift.
Not always. Sometimes the file size can go from a few hundred KB to two or three megs, which is more than a bit, especially if you're putting the images online where they will be accessed by people on dial-up. Also, for some things like photographs, lossless compression isn't always necessary. So while PNG would make a good fall-back option if JPG wasn't available, it isn't close to a perfect replacement.
RTFA. They do have prior art.
Abort/Retry/YOU FAIL
Gee, where have I seen that before?
This first came out in 2002.
http://www.jpeg.org/newsrel1.html
Does anyone have a link to their archive of prior art, or any other listing of prior art for this patent? A cursory googling didn't turn up the results I was looking for.
I guess it took a few years before they built up a sufficiently strong case, as well as a sufficiently strong war chest to take on a corporate bully. Good luck to Pub Pat.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
As a small added bonus, PNG was the first W3C Recommendation (in 1996) (see the REC). It came well before their HTML 4.0 (1998). But I guess Slashdotters already knows such things... ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
"threatening this international standard" - Is this true? I am curious. Who in the world cares about US software patent problems?
Actually, IE does not render PNGs with transparency properly. The current version in common use (6.0) renders transparency in PNGs as a gray background.
"Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that!" - George Carlin.
...know such things... ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Last I knew the implementation of transparencies for the PNG format on IE wasn't quite right. You have to do some Gimp magic to fix it.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Um...did you even read the wikipedia article you referenced?
From your post:
Unlike JPEGs, PNGs can be lossless
And from the article:
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless bitmap image format.
By saying PNGs can be lossless, you imply they can be lossy as well...which is not what they were designed for.
From your post:
Sure, they tend to be a bit larger than JPEGs, but I figure the gain in quality is often worth it.
And from the article:
Using PNG instead of a high quality JPEG for such images would result in a large increase in filesize (often 5-10 times) with negligible gain in quality.
And finally, from the article:
PNG was not intended to replace the other popular web image format JPEG.
PNG is intended as a replacement for GIF, not JPG.
Hope this clears things up.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
It's not about self esteem, prestige, or anything like that. These bottom feeders are below all of that. They only care about making as much money as they can, even if it is only through underhanded methods like patent trolling. It's good that at least someone is challenging them.
Here's what. What happens when someone claims rights on PNG too after everyone starts using it? What we have happening here is the patent board is unable to understand prior art and granting patents on obvious and pre-existing technology.
The issue is not this particular patent, but the issue is blocking other corporations and lawyer clusters from trying to gain broadly worded patents that incorporate pre existing technology from obscure sources so they can make money.
By saying PNGs can be lossless, you imply they can be lossy as well...which is not what they were designed for.
Conversion from truecolor to indexed PNG is lossy.
PNG is intended as a replacement for GIF, not JPG.
Then what Free format was designed to replace JPEG?
SO what? If the format isn't broken, then MS can fix bloody IE!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If, and I say IF the patent is valid from a 'no prior art' and is not intuitively obvious, then the complaint is rather suspect.
... also asks the US Patent Office to take notice of Compression Labs' "aggressive assertion" of its patent, which it says is causing substantial public harm."
"The Public Patent Foundation
If the patent is valid and the public has used it regardless, then they are within their rights (legal and quite likely moral) to defend it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The problem seems to arise when a patent is sold. It seems like the patent rules should be changed so that patent infringement can only apply when the original party filing the patent has been harmed. It makes sense to protect the inventor - that's what patents are for. The problem seems to arise when the party who is claiming infringement is not using the patent to generate revenue (excluding law suits). It seems like there should be a "minimum reasonable usage" clause in the patent law. By "minimum reasonable usage" means - you as a patent holder are using the patent in your livelihood or the corporations livelihood.
What happens when someone claims rights on PNG too after everyone starts using it?
Most claims of damages would more than likely be estopped by laches.
PNG relies on DEFLATE compression, invented by Phil Katz and donated to the public domain. True, other parts of PNG may be patented, but PNG has been in use for nearly a decade, and no patent holder has stepped up to claim that a subsisting patent covering any part of PNG even exists. At least in the case of GIF, the existence of U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts that covered LZW compression was common knowledge, even if Unisys did unilaterally change the royalty structure for the last 5 or so years of the patent term.
This is dumb, and some would argue anti-competetive monopolistic behaviour. You have a patent on something cool. You let people use it without any royalties; it becomes popular. Really popular. Then, all of a sudden, you start charging royalties, and everyone is trapped. It would not have become that popular if royalties had been there in the first place.
This is reminiscent of two things: Microsoft (slightly different modus operandi), and drug dealers (the first one's free kiddies).
Should be that if you don't enforce your patent within a reasonable time frame, you lose the right to do so. In a perfect world. Which we are far, far, away from.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Actually you can use some javascript to get IE to render transparent PNGs "properly".
e.g. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/
Actually baseline JPEG can be lossy, but there does exist a JPEG variant with lossless compression.
Does anyone have a link to their archive of prior art, or any other listing of prior art for this patent?
Start from TFA to PUBPAT ACTIVITIES > Protecting the Public Domain to Forgent Networks JPEG patent to the request for reexamination. This request lists U.S. Patent 4,541,012 (now expired) as the key prior art in this case.
"Forgent Networks is a classic example of the new and rapidly growing trend of patent holders that do nothing more than sue people who make products or services available to the public," said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's Executive Director. "Unfortunately, the patent system allows for such perverse behavior because it cares more about patent holders than it does the public."
BURN!! ;)
PNG doesn't compress photos nearly as well as JPEG. Your pr0n sites with full size photos as small as 100 ~ 300kB would suddenly start serving 3M files for each picture.
I assume that they filed under the current system since, if the old system of 17 years after the granting of the patent were in place at the time of filing, the patent would have already expired over a year ago.
U.S. patents are issued with a term of grant + 3.5 years. Three renewals are available: grant + 7.5 years, grant + 11.5 years, and the full term. For this and other U.S. patents subsisting as of mid-1996, when the Uruguay Round Agreements Act came into effect in the United States, the full term is the longer of filing + 20 years or grant + 17 years.
MNG replaces JPEG
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Conversion from truecolor to indexed PNG is lossy.
And so is conversion from truecolor to 256-color BMP, and so, in fact, is cropping a BMP to include the middle 27.6% of the image. Is BMP lossy?
Of course not. You can do things to any file to lose information, and reducing the number of colors in an image is obviously one of them. You can't say text files are lossy just because you can convert a Unicode text file to ASCII and lose some characters in the process.
Then what Free format was designed to replace JPEG?
I don't think there are any formats comparable to JPEG currently, and I know that there certainly aren't any in widespread use. That's the whole point of this article. If JPEG users get screwed, then we're in serious trouble. Think about how many photos on the web are in JPEG format, and how many photos on people's computers are JPEG.
Allegedly, the replacement format for JPEG is JNG, which is a subspec of MNG. MNG has a truckload of features including: animation (with sprites!), color correction, and (almost tangentially) lossy JPEG-like compression. The latter is available in a separate format called JNG too. Of course, on the one hand we need support for MNG in applications (consider for example how it was removed from Mozilla; there are high hopes for it to be reintroduced in SeaMonkey, though). And of course, there is my very personal perplexity ... by looking at the JNG spec, it looks like it's very similar to JPEG ... is it really outside of the bounds of that stupid patent?
(Of course, everybody should be using JPEG2000 by now, which compresses much better with much less artefacts ... of course that's patented too ...)
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Perhaps, but personally I find that SVG, when properly implemented is the best of all. Transparency (full), layers, animation, scripting, and good color support. What isn't to like?
I used to be in love with PNG as a format--it offered the one thing that jpeg lacked (transparency), while maintaining many of the good qualities. Then I started using Inkscape and svg. I love it. It is a smaller file size, zips extremely well, and offers everything that png does.
Is it good for raster art? NO, not all, but for almost everything but photo, vector is a wonderful way to go.
For photos, however, jpeg is the best--hands down. I don't prefer png for that--it just isn't there.
One of two things should happen--either a free format that is equal to (or better, superior to) jpeg needs to be developed OR jpeg needs to become patent free. Personally I don't like patents as a general principle (I would be happy with either five or ten year patents, however), but at the same time I think it is hardly fair to a company to force it to give up patents on a technology without treating other companies the same way. Personally, I think this wouldn't be an issue if the patent system were set up correctly. Automatically expiring patents seems like the best thing to me. This would give companies a chance to profit from their labor for five or ten years before they no longer had control over the technology. It would maintain a large incentive to invent, but would prevent the current patent-crazy system that we do.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
This type of stuff only reinforces the need to free software patents and helps the intiatives spearheaded at nosoftwarepatents.com
\
"Should be that if you don't enforce your patent within a reasonable time frame, you lose the right to do so."
Agreed, or as an alternative automatic limitation: if a patent is included in an official international standard with either the consent of the patent-holder, or the justifiable ignorance of the standardizers (they did due dilligence, but it was a "submarine patent"), then the patent is invalidated. Meaning in other words, that if standardization was contemplated, patent holders would be forced to crawl out of the woodwork then and there, or be stripped of the patent.
Submarine patents in standards are so obviously bad, that this fix might be more saleable to politicians than the generic "must enforce", which would turn existing patent jurisprudence on its head.
FWIW, Adobe's PDF includes embedded images using DCT or discrete cosine transform for compression. If you extract the image sections from the document, you end up with a JPEG file.
I'll be happy when the majority of stuff has switched over to PNG.
Let this company keep on giving people a hard time about JPEG.
.... however it is copyrightable.
Copyrights last alot longer.... infinity according to the changing of laws to extend then before they expire..
Now the thing is, can you write an algorythim/program to do the same thing in such a manner that a picture compressed by it can be uncompressed by jpeg engines, without infringing upon the copyright?
if you can't then....still do the right thing and oppose the fraud of software patents.
Patent law needs to be made like trademark law: Use it or lose it. Basically if you are going to patent something, you need to either exert that patent, or the patent should lose standing. I would say something like if you fail to contact a company for a period of 6 months after a product using your patented technology is marketed on a level that you should be reasonably aware of it, you lose your patent.
So you are still protected, if someone is just developing something in secret, no problem, even if someone releases a product is a very small market that you wouldn't reasonably know about, no problem. However if your patent is in a product being sold on a wide scale, you have 6 months starting from when it is to contact the company. Failure to do so nullifies your patent.
I think that would keep it fair, such that people could patent and profit from ideas, but that you can't just patent something and wait for someone to be huge and then sandbag them.
So, whatever is really liked by many can not belong to anyone and should be confiscated? So much for unreasonable ceasures...
Gotta think of something better to say...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Forgive me if I am wrong, but I went through the patent: Motion compensation, intraframes etc... isn't it the MPEG format we are talking about? JPEG is the static picture encoding format that is based on the cosin transform. MPEG also uses cosign transform but many other techniques among which motion compensation DPCM etc.
If you read the pubpatent filing, their main point is that an earlier patent, issued to the same company, is prior art for all the points in the '672' patent. The earlier patent was filed more than a year (plus one month) prior to the filing of the '672' patent, which makes it legally prior art.
Anyway, the sucker has less than a year to run, as it was filed in October, 1986. Probably why the lampreys at Forgent are pushing so aggressively. It'll only be a cash cow for another 11 months.
Interestingly, I could have been a target of Unisys, except they couldn't have gotten much blood from this stone. I was the original author of the "compress" program, which turned into an early "open source" effort (although the term hadn't been invented at the time). Compress was an implementation of LZW, based on Welch's 1984 paper in Computer. Only later was I informed that it was patented. After it had been incorporated into Berkeley Unix releases and into the GIF format. I was happy when that patent finally expired, but I had absolutely no doubt of its legitimacy.
As for the claimed superiority of PNG over JPEG, I'd say it depends on the application. JPEG was designed precisely and specifically for the purpose of compressing photographic images. Such images
- Do not compress well using techniques like LZW and Huffman coding
- Have intrinsic variation in pixel values due to noise in the recording process
- Don't have precisely straight and sharp edges
These characteristics make them poorly suited to lossless compression techniques, and also mean that a lossy technique will not degrade the image further than the original noisy recording method did. (Unless you turn up the loss level too high.)Because of the "if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" principle, people have used JPEG in applications that it's not suited for -- applications where the lossy compression DOES degrade the image quality, and where a different method (LZW, for example) would in fact give a smaller file. Then other people point at these examples and say "PNG (or GIF) is better than JPEG!" My toolbox has hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, etc. I try to pick the appropriate tool, and don't hammer with a wrench, for example. The same should be true of our computer tools.
Copyrights and patents aren't two names for the same thing. Inventions can be patented; the creative expression of an idea can be copyrighted. The idea itself cannot; see Feist v. Rural .
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
We've seen this before.
When RSA got popular and people realized that it was patented, there was a large effort to switch to DSA. Right about the time that all the pieces of DSA support were in place, the RSA patent expired so people just kept using RSA.
When GIF got popular and people realized that LZW was patented, PNG was created. By the time PNG was actually supported more-or-less correctly in browsers, the LZW patent expired.
I suspect if this JPEG madness keeps up, people will try to switch to JPEG 2000 (which is still patented, but at least the patent holders appear friendly). But it looks like the JPEG patent expires around 2007, which does not leave enough time to switch to anything.
Precedent is what the judge decides it to be.* The judge is free to ignore it, just as juries are free to ignore certain things (jury nullification) in crimminal cases.
*Keep in mind that patent cases are civil matters. That means only lawyers, and a judge. There might be some expert witnesses were needed.
This patent issued on October 6, 1987. Patents from that era last for 17 years from the date they issue. 17 years + Oct 6 1987 = Oct 6 2004. The patent expired over a year ago. It (what the patent protects) is now in the public domain for all to use.
Real products are a distraction for these people. Forgent got millions out of various companies without developing anything. Since the legal fees (costs) are much less than the licensing revenue, it's a self-perpetuating system. The RIAA settlements are the same way; each settlement pays for N new lawsuits to be filed and the profit rises exponentially.
The design intent of the algorithm is
1. Force patent holders to reveal themselves when standards are being created.
2. Force all standards to be patent-free.
3. Entice the state of the art to track patent-free standards and starve patent-wielding companies.
PNG and JPEG fill different niches. They're different tools for different jobs. PNG is designed to be lossless and was meant as a successor to GIF rather than JPEG. JPEGs are a bit smaller because they throw out a lot of the information (hence are lossy) that isn't as high priority. It's a format for distribution rather than one that you'll want to work in while you manipulate images. For that you should probably be using TIFF or PSD. If you are constantly makinge changes to a set of images, the increase in storage space, while significant percentage-wise shouldn't make that much of a difference.
GIF, JPEG and PNG are meant for distribution of images over networks where banwidth usage matters. JPEG compresses photographs well. GIFs and PNGs are better for rasterizing text and vector graphics for diagrams and logos... usually things that aren't high in complexity but have a more extreme contrast than you'd find in a vacation photo. If you're seeing a big difference in quality, your JPEG compressor is probably set to being too lossy.
Technical issues aside it would definitely be nice to have an unencumbered lossy format to replace JPEGs but there are so many ridiculous patents nowadays that you'd probably invest most of your time figuring out what algorithms are safe to use.
but someone would get rich if he/she invented a way to detect dupes!
CLI's aggressive assertion ...
I didn't know CLI has anything to do with JPEGs. I get pics in my CLI like this "cat ascii_art.txt".
w00t
Software is indeed patentable. This was decided in the Diamond v. Diehr case over 20 years ago. Thousands of software patents have been granted since then, and the requirements have gotten weaker over that time. Whether they ought to be allowed is very debatable, but the fact of the law isn't.
Secondly, copyright only applies to a specific work. If your work is not a direct modification of the other work then you are not infringing upon copyright. This happens all the time. WINE does not violate Windows copyright. Open Office does not violate Office's copyright. The is a ton of legal precedent that reverse engineering is legal.
Why is misinformation like this constantly modded this up? I have never seen a group of people who knew so little about a subject that they care so much about as in the slashdot copyright discussions.
Then what Free format was designed to replace JPEG?
There is so much of a software investment in JPEG that it is very unlikely it is going anywhere anything soon. JPEG2000 once had a futuristic name, but even it has seen pretty much no interest because JPEG has satisfied the market, and entrenched technologies are highly resistant to change.
In any case, one format I'm interested in is the RAW format that Canon uses on its cameras. My Rebel XT saves a 8MP picture in about a 4-5MB JPEG (obviously in fine), but when I go to the apparently lossless RAW it only jumps to 7-8MB. A minor increase in file size, really, to lose no image data.
Of course because software expects JPEGs using that image format is a major pain in the ass.
ah, but it's called RAW for a reason. It means it's a raw format, but there are no documented specs for most RAW files produced by cameras. They are all completly different. Standardization is a good thing people! Why can't camera manufactures get this right?
I don't know much about the origins of the JPEG algorythem, although I am very familiar with how it works.
I spent about an a hour reading though that patent filed in 1987. It really explains a lot of things in detail that are almost identical to how JPEG does it.
The language they use is a bit off like talking about Runlengths a lot.
Anyhow unless there is some prior art, they may have this one fair and square.
As for all those out there that believe all software and inventions should be free, It destroys all point in an inventor struggling to do something revolutionary.
Benjamin Franklin one of our nations founders and a brilliant inventor, came up with the idea of protecting copyright and patents (Intellectual Property). Before him these thing didn't hold any value.
I just read that Color Bubble story on Slashdot here, that how the Guy spent 10 years to come up with a surfactant and Dye. He make a substancial inventment of time and money because the was the possiblity of large financial reward.
Without Patents we would be in Mexico, China, India, or Russia where there just isn't anywhere near as much innovation.
John L. Sokol
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
OK, since first day I saw jpeg 2000, I am confused.
It produces images with no glitches and excellent space needs.
When I asked why people don't use it instead of jpeg, I was answered "It has patent issues". After switching to OS X, I noticed jpeg2000 is supported in the OS frameworks itself.
Now JPEG has some patent issues too, why people don't use jpeg 2000 to make jpeg obsolete?
meaning that they don't lose quality each time you save them
Really? they lose quality every time you save them? So if I send you a pic and you save it on
your PC then the pic will have less quality than the one I sent you?
Pictures lose quality because you compress them not because you save them, I hope you know that...
They have already been challaged by many, but for the first time someone has a concrete case with 'prior art'. You can read more on this at The Data Compression News Blog
White Knight Charges Forgent http://www.c10n.info/archives/246
[Disclaimer: Shameless self promotion]
Not that this is the right solution, but why don't they just apply the same logic go trademark as to patents: defend it or lose it. In this case, they didn't defend it in time. If this was a trademark issue they'd be out of luck: you can't just pop in years after it's become common usage and ask for it back.
Cheers.
JPEG 2000 is a perfect example of why such patents need to be fought. Nobody will ever adopt it, or formats like it, while there are such legal swords of Damocles threatening them. Look here, where apparently the JPEG group seems to have given up on the idea of certifying that JPEG is patent-safe.
IE can render transparencies in the old .GIF style. Which, to me, is sort of like having a special "colour" that is transparent for rendering.
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer can not render the much cooler alpha channel that PNG supports. This would make things like the blending of images over a background image / colour much easier. At least we get more than 256 colours w/PNG's and IE.
Computers suck. Web design really sucks. And being a geek, I really wish that I was kidding...
1 year to go. Not enough to redo your product lines so you are forced to pay up. What hppened to Compression Labs? How come they only just noticed their case?
I am allowed to defend myself, but if I hack you to pieces, that aint right. Why? Because it is an overreaction. Because they left this alone until long after it became a standard (why not say "hang on, I own that idea!"? And because the timing is meant to make the most pressure for folding, this is abusive use of their rights.
Maybe they ought to be fined. A couple of billion ought to do it.
JPEG2000 is significantly better than plain JPEG (much better lossy compression than JPEG, better lossless than PNG on some images); the group who made it promised that while it is patented, it'll be free to implement the basic standard. I'm already using it for my personal work, isn't it about time it got some proper app support? (I use it for lossless backups, but that means converting with Imagemagick every time -- It'd be nice if the GIMP could edit it, and even better if something like firefox would support viewing it online~)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
And let me tell you, neither business nor morality are not among their strong points. Before they become Forgent, they used to be a company called VTEL, a manufacturer of video teleconferencing equipment. (aside: VTEL still exists today...the name was bought out by employees who wanted to actually continue running a business...they make some pretty solid stuff.) Then the upper management was replaced by a bunch of clowns who couldn't seem to do anything right and proceeded to run the company into the ground.
A shining example of the moral caliber of these guys: They hired a longtime friend of the company to mine their patent portfolio for possible revenue. His payment was to be a percentage of any revenue generated by this effort. He discovered this so-called "JPEG Patent" and the legal team sprang into action. But, before he could realize any profit from the enforcement, he died. So, they pocketed his portion. His widow sued for his share, and lost. They then successfully countersued her and won damages.
The company's history is littered with incidents like this.
Legally, these guys may be in the right. Morally and ethically, they are as bankrupt as can be.
People at the USPTO need to go to jail for granting patents like these. They are crippling, willfully, the US economy. A bad patent has all the effect of sinking an oil tanker, and the effects are longers lasting. We still don't have encrypted email because of the willful sabotage committed at the USPTO by granting the RSA patent.
Throw a couple of examiners in jail. They'll read the next patent more thoroughly then.
The primary examiner on the patent was Howard W. Britton. He was either incompetant, or willfully neglegent when he granted this patent. If I make a mistake this serious at my job, I can be held seriously accountable for it. So should Mr. Britton.
I am in no way exaggerating or being sarcastic. In my honest opinion Britton deserves to go to jail for the damage he has done to the economy, and the disgrace he has brought on the entire patent system.
May the Maths Be with you!
Hence Whataever --> Whatever.
Just because the assholes get their hand on some money and screw other people, doesn't make it right. I don't want to live my life like that, so they can have it all, and the reprecussions (bad health, bad morals, bad karma). I don't envy them a bit. I pity the pathetic money-grabbing and loss of innocense.
When I look such people in their eyes, I can see the spark is nearly gone. It's like a crook's dream of happiness in paradise with stolen money. It is unreal, because you will always be chased, you will never be able to escape from yourself and your misdeeds.
Then I look into a child's eyes. Full of life, enthusiasm, wonder and all the good qualities. That is what I value in life.
Now I can't convert my images into seperate wavestreams and encode them as a 3-channel MPE^H^H^H ogg-vorbis file.
/dev/hat /mnt/head
It looks like the days of listening to our images are over. I wonder what the RIAA has to say about this?
mount -t tinfoil
Is there any support for mng? Last time i read /. about it mng support in mozilla was dropped i believe.
-Is there support for creating animated png in popular applications?
-And the browsers?
Not quite correct, paletted PNGs with 1-bit transparency (all that non-animated GIFs do) are rendered correctly. Full color PNGs with alpha channel are rendered with the background color instead of alpha (gray might however be the default for PNGs that don't contain a background color, haven't used IE for a while).
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
or another seperate one?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Then what Free format was designed to replace JPEG?
none because JPEG was not belived to be free of patent issues.
there has been some challange to this recently by the use of an incrediblly dubious patent, only time will tell if this succeeds or not.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Huffmann coding was not considered patented at the time. The LZW algorithm had patent issues, but I reckoned at the time we could do LZW-compatible coding with a two-pass algorithm: the only unique feature of LZW was the reoptimization of the compression tables as the data was being processed.
There is a 1935 Italian patent on the compression of images, including colour images, for fax using variable length codes for different picture elements. The claims are sufficiently general the invalidate a lot of run-length compression schemes.
That's just what I can remember while writing this. I am not impressed by their patent. There are lots of dud patents in there. It is easy to search the patent database, and become convinced there is a claim. Look at prior art in products and in theliterature, and it is a different story.
Did anyone actually read their challenge on this patent? Their agument is that the nasty company had earlier patents that made the JPEG patent 'obvious'. Not sure that the patent office will buy this 'self defeating' argument. I think that if they want to challenge the patent, they have to come up with something real - and not lame.
Since its inception over three years ago, Forgent's [CLI parent] intellectual property program has generated more than $100 million in revenues primarily from licensing the '672 Patent to more than 40 different companies in Asia, Europe and the United States. [ full article http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/051031/099653.html ]
AFAIR, a patent's term is 17 years: but according to the link to the USPTO web site from the original article, the Patent was filed in 1987, and 1987+17 = 2004. So what's going on?
--
E.
nah...
I think that the USPTO needs more power and involvment... as well as $$$.
Give them the power to put a patent in review, and dont let any legal action
be taken on patents in review. Dont penalise them for being under funded,
fund them and empower them. I dont like big government as much as the next guy,
but patents are allready powerfull, the institution that governs them
needs to be equaly powerful.
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into your own beliefs?
PNG is lossless, so it looks good. JPEG is lossy, so it's small. You can get much better compression on photographic (lots of colors, few uniform color areas, few if any geometric features--this is only my crude layman's impression) images using lossy compression with JPEG, and furthermore, it's adjustable so if you need less quality, you can recover more bandwidth. PNG can only compress such images so far, and no farther.
By contrast, PNG can represent alpha transparency, so (if your browser supports it.. hope IE7 is out soon) you can get neat effects with PNG. PNG is also great at presenting images, created with vector graphics, to software that doesn't do vector rendering. That means logos on web pages, line drawings of all sorts such as scientific plots, etc. But the reason it's good for such things is that such images benefit far more from lossless rendering (than photographs or 2d art or the like).
PNG is great technology, but you can't simply put aside JPEG yet. Like PNG, JPEG is good at what it does, what it's intended for.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
... much sound and fury signifying nothing.
It's a Gilbert and Sullivan musical? Oh, no...that's words and music signifying nothing.
(apologies to Tom Lehrer)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just use the right format, "right" defined as "smallest picture file in bytes that still looks OK."
If it's real-life pictures with lots of different colors please use 150K JPG so that us dialup users don't have to wait 5 minutes for the equivalent 1.5 MB PNG to download.
"He was either incompetant, or willfully neglegent when he granted this patent. If I make a mistake this serious at my job, I can be held seriously accountable for it. So should Mr. Britton."
Well, first off, was it a mistake? From a number of the replies we have seen here, as well as the fact that the patent has not been struck down, it is not OBVIOUS that this patent is invalid. Also, you have to look at the patent as the state of the technology AT THE TIME OF THE INVENTION. Which, in this case, is 1986. Were you aware of the prevelant use of THIS compression (it was not named jpeg at this point) for images?
In addition, Mr. Britton was a very good examiner who faithfully served our patent system for over 40 years. If you would like to make a dispagaring remark against his work, would you please present evidence that it was, in fact, an invalid patent. And would you do so in under 14 hours (this is the amount of time that a primary examiner in this field is alloted to fully examine a patent of this nature).
Our patent system is, without a doubt, flawed. The examiners are asked to do to much in to little time. It is difficult to reconstruct what the environment was like during the time in which the invention was conceived, especially on the so-called "submarine" patents. However, be aware that the examiners working for the office are doing their best in the time given to them to make sure that the inventors are rewarded for their inventions.
Note: IF this patent is valid, it should not be viewed as damaging to the economy as it is protecting the right of the inventor to limit the use of his invention. If you have a problem with this then you have a problem with the patent system in general. In truth, I have a problem with other companies purchasing patents instead of purchasing licenses. It does seem to do nothing more than spawn companies whose sole buisness is enforcing patents instead of developing new technology.
Yea reely. They r teh sux0r.
Fuck teh system!!!!!!!1111
Did you read the filing?
I'm not saying I would have invented using DCTs to compress images. Do note however that this patent covers using a Huffman table to compress piecewise (large run + small run type) RLE compressed data. It's actually very similar to T.4 (Group 3 fax) encoding.
But if you read the filing, it's clear lawyers use the word obvious to cover a case regular people normally wouldn't.
If you read the article, basically what it says is that the new patent is an obvious derivation of the original patent. It basically says the original patent described the entire process in this patent, and in most cases in more detail than this one does. Thus, this patent is "anticipated" by previous patents, in that if you read all the other patents in the field, it wouldn't be describing anything you didn't already know.
Additionally, the new patent fails to disclose many related patents in the area that were owned by the same company when this patent was filed. 3 of those even have the same author as this patent! This is a rule 56 violation, and additionally would be one of the steps you would take if you wanted to try to patent something which had already been patented (as is suggested here).
So, since that other patent anticipates (renders obvious) this patent and that one is expired already, this stuff should be free and clear.
I do agree JPEG is used when it shouldn't be many times. But then again, I think most of the time you'd be better to use JPEG2000 over JPEG anyway.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I'm sure it was because I too a pro-patent stance, and not based on how relivant or interesting my post was.
Not cool guys.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
>Agreed. This is nothing more than a sligtly sophisticated form of "I want free JPEGs!!!1".
IANAL, but...
IMHO, this is at least akin to equitable estoppel, while wiping its nose with kleenex. (NOT TM)
1: When did jpeg compression start becoming known, and multiple independent implementations available?
2: When did jpeg compression become practically ubiquitous, the de-facto "standard of the industry" for image compression?
3: When did Compression Labs begin trying to assert ownership against jpeg compression?
4: PROFIT!!!
Equitable estoppel essentially says you can't go back on an agreement. In this case, there was no actual agreement made to allow jpeg compression to be royalty-free, but we can say that there was an implied agreement. That's why I brought up the word "kleenex", and note that it's not capitalized. "Kleenex," and in this case I would have capitalized it, even had it not begun the sentence, used to be a trademark. The makers wanted to own the paper handkerchief market, so they wanted "Kleenex" to be practically synonymous with "paper handkerchief." But on the road to ubiquity, they succeeded too well, and by not asserting their trademark, they lost it. You can't have it both ways, you can have a trademark, or you can have a descriptive term.
IMHO, assertion of patent rights in a case like this must be done promptly, or be lost. It's rather underhanded to let your IP become a de-facto (or de-jur, for that matter) standard, and THEN assert rights. Had people known that jpeg compression was encumbered when it first came out, they would have responded the same way the png counters gif. The "appearance of free use" was what allowed jpeg to become a de-facto standard. Also IMHO, giving that "appearance of free use" is the agreement that makes this equitable estoppel.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Or better yet, make the patent examiner financially liable for wrongfully issued patents. If it's overturned, the restitution costs and penalties come out of his paycheck. That would likely be a stronger threat than jailtime, and would also help reimburse those injured by bad patents.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Sounds just like a pyramid scheme using the legal system.... Yikes!
In any case, one format I'm interested in is the RAW format that Canon uses on its cameras. My Rebel XT saves a 8MP picture in about a 4-5MB JPEG (obviously in fine), but when I go to the apparently lossless RAW it only jumps to 7-8MB. A minor increase in file size, really, to lose no image data.
.JPG. If you instead store the pictures as RAW, the guessing part is skipped, as it will be done by the computer program importing the image.
The reason for the RAW file being so small is rather sad:
The CCD of your camera does not record enough information for a real 24 bit 8MP picture. 2/3 of the picture information is pure guesswork added by algorithms inside the camera. RAW files does not contain the guessed information and consequently they are only approx. 1/3 of the size of a real 24 bit 8MP uncompressed picture.
The explanation:
For each of those 8 million pixels, the CCD is only recording one color instead of all 3 colors. The two other colors in each pixel are guessed, based on values of neighbour pixels. Then the final picture, containing 2/3 guessed information is saved as a
So this is really not a smart way to losslessly compress existing pictures. It would actually be very lossy.
Have you any idea how much money you're talking about? Nobody would take the job with risks like these. They'd have to buy insurance, which itself would be prohibitively expensive. The pay for the job of patent examiner would have to rise to above that of pro football stars, to cover the risk. The cost of patents in turn would have to rise to cover the costs, pricing small inventors out of the market.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Its just you being incompetent. (Thanks who ever modded the other way)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Yep, I thought about that... tho I suppose whether several years in jail or a massive fine sounds worse depends on your point of view. Okay, so penalizing incompetent patent examiners to the degree of monetary harm they cause is probably going overboard [g] but certainly they could be reasonably penalized by charging them at the level of the original patent fee. In terms of time incarcertated vs lost earnings, direct fines would probably be less than the equivalent in jail time, but certainly more immediate (statutory fines need not involve court trials, etc.)
Even if the patent examiner themselves weren't penalized directly, the USPTO could be, and in that case the fine for incompetence could be much higher than if an individual got dinged (and would avoid "but the office boy did it" buck-passing). As to the personnel involved, "You are reduced two steps in rank. Return to your post."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Bandwidth costs money
real products also make patent litigation a lot harder to win at because it means you can be forced into cross licensing.
thats why theese litigation firms are so scary to the big companies, they effectively can't be countersued.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
i presume he was reffering to saving from an editing tool not just saving a downloaded file.
whilst there are tools that can perform some operations on jpeg losslessly they aren't all that well known and are quite limited in what they can do.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
JPG stands for JOINT pictures expert group. The standard was designed as a joint effort and JPG algorithms should never have been granted patent status unless the patent was granted to the group as a whole. You cannot build something from a blueprint and then claim it as your original idea so why was the original patent granted?