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."

Comments

Patent law needs rethinking

[squidinkcalligraphy]

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.

Re:Isn't this like what happened with GIFs?

[tomstdenis]

The problem is most good image codecs are a patent mindfield [e.g. wavelets]. You can still do things like 5/9 [or whatever] and then typical entropy encoding. I think ... not 100% on top of the graphics scene.

Though a simple Haar wavelet can be effective [and with a tweak lossless].

Actually you can perform bincoding and/or lifting to most domain transforms [e.g. DCT] and wavelet based codecs to get a transform that works with integers only and can be lossless. The "bindct" papers of a few years ago are a good example. They showed how to do DCT type IV [i think, whatever JPEG uses] using only integer transforms [shifts,adds,subs] that got coding gains close to the traditional DCT.

For raster images PNG is as good as it gets at the moment. You could do a block sorting codec to get a slight better compression ratio but not by much [and it wouldn't be good for progressive images].

As for truecolour images there really isn't much unfortunately.

Tom