Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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.
Gee, where have I seen that before?
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.
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
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.
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
This type of stuff only reinforces the need to free software patents and helps the intiatives spearheaded at nosoftwarepatents.com
\
.... 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.
In all seriousness, at least all the ["valid"] GIF-related patents [in America] have expired. Too bad PNG has already come so far; the only use for GIFs now is animated smileys for Something Awful Forums.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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.
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.
Animated PNGs aren't possible (yet), alas...
Well, it all depends on your definition of what PNG is.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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.
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.
"Diamon v. Diehr" is only law in the US and does not apply to rest of the world, which is what I suspect the other poster is trying to say. The long term effects that software patents will have on our country's economy is going to be devastating if our developers have to fear being sued for using ideas here that programmers elsewhere are free build upon.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You truncated it and and mispelled it:
/noob =D
"Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." 'Whataever it is, I fear the Greeks even when they are bearing gifts'
Or 'Ein Danaergeschenk' (the Greek Gift) in German.
Foo?
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!
see my other post above, to which I would add the following statement: since all the other major patent offices are using the first to file system, it would probably be safe to say it is the better system. Removing steps from the patent process makes the job of the office easier and gives examiners more time to focus on the patent work.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."