PUBPAT Makes Progress Against JPEG Patent

The Data Compression News Blog writes "The US Patent Office has granted the Public Patent Foundation's request for a reexamination of the patent which Forgent Networks is reportedly using to harass anyone that implements the widely used JPEG format. They have already been challenged by many, but PUBPAT had the first concrete case with 'prior art'. In its Order granting PUBPAT's request, the Patent Office found that PUBPAT raised 'a substantial new question of patentability' regarding every claim of the the '672 Patent."

Comments

stupid myspace

[Anonymous Coward]

its all because of myspace. everyone wants to have pictures of their friends in jpg format, and s now the internet is crashing.

Re:stupid myspace

[Traiklin]

they could crash it faster by using the BMP format.

Re:stupid myspace

[Anonymous Coward]

Or WMF...

Could they be sued? succesfully?

[robbak]

Question: If a corporation like this recieves licence fees for an invalid patent, What is preventing the licensees suing them for the money that they have extorted?

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Stumbles]

I have often wondered that very same thing. In the end though. I think it goes something like this from the licensors point of view; Sorry you are not due any monies, refund, etal. When you (licensee) entered into the agreement it was done by both parties under good faith concerning the validity of the patent license you agreed to. Now I don't know how well they can make that stick in a court of law. But then otoh, it could go something along the lines of selling the Brooklyn Bridge even if that were not their intention.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason the patent holders can keep the money is because the law favors them completely.

Let's say I had a company with reasonable funds (enough to support going to court). I have a patent that looks pretty solid so I ask Sony to pay me a license fee. Sony comes back and offers me a contract that says "we agree to pay this license fee, however, the full amount shall be refunded in the event that the patent is invalidated".

My company would just say "sorry, remove that invalidation clause or we'll sue you for patent infringement and win".

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[TFoo]

Most likely because there would be something in the "licensing agreement" to protect the patent holder from exactly this kind of thing....some legal language that basically says "even if the patents are found invalid, we still get to keep your money"

If the patent holder could be shown to have been working in bad faith (ie they knew the patent should not be valid, but were extorting the money anyway) then it is probably a different situation, but that would be a very difficult thing to prove.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they cannot. Patent 665,678,443,234 already covers the process of doing that.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Scooby Snacks]

Your question is based on an invalid premise, namely, that there is anything preventing anybody from suing anybody else for any or no reason.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[nbert]

I don't have any clue about US law (TM), but I assume that the contract someone is subscribing to in order to use certain technological archievements is constructed in a manner which basically says that 'we (the company holding the patents) won't sue you if you use this kind of technology'. Just like SCO's antidot license.
So there won't be any regress.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Raul654]

"Your question is based on an invalid premise, namely, that there is anything preventing anybody from suing anybody else for any or no reason."
 
There does exist such a mechanism. A court can deem a party to be a "vexatious litigant", at which point they have to get permission of a judge to file suit. On the other hand, these are usually used against people who represent themselves and file many, many frivilous suits.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Almost-Retired]

I think thats a hell of a good question. There could be the argument that the original claim was fraudulent, so therefore any and all contracts are null and void, and Oh, By the Way, We would like our money back with interest at the prevailing fed rate at least, plus triple damages for the fraud, plus all attorney's fees. That would bring this whole mess to such a screeching halt it would take 20 years to get the burnt rubber and asbestos dust out of the environment.

Nice concept, but like the Blackberry case (I think the NTP patents were in fact issued, and purchased in good faith, and that the disruption that would be caused by a Blackberry shutdown is the overriding consideration here, no surprise, so just move along now folks) I don't imagine there will be any compensatory remedies available for anyone unless the entire SC goes out on a 20 foot persimmon limb hanging over quicksand and saws it off behind them. To do so would deal a blow to commerce in general that it would be a long time recovering, and the legal profession that pursued all this will never stand for being made responsible for their own averice. So naahh, right may be right, but tain't gonna happen till the revolution, whenever that is.

Whats a Democracy? Anybody got a good definition that actually makes sense in view of todays real world, existing facts? This sure as hell isn't it.

--
Cheers, Gene

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Scooby Snacks]

Thanks for the information! I consider myself corrected.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[darkmeridian]

It's in the contract. Parties license patents to avoid litigation. They know the patent may be invalid, but it's easier to settle sometimes rather than die trying. They waive their right to recoup the licensing costs if the patents are later invalidated. Exceptions exist if there was inequitable conduct (basically fraud) before the PTO while obtaining the patents. then all bets are off.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[ediron2]

Redress, not regress. And it must be getting late. I stared at that word for far too long, thinking 'THAT ain't right... er, IS it?!' before finally recalling the correct word.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[jcr]

Generally, the license to the patent includes a clause that says that the licensee can't get their money back if the patent is eventually ruled invalid.

-jcr

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Magada]

I wonder... Could the RIAA be deemed to be such a litigant?

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Oligonicella]

You missed his point. He was writing in past tense. Your company already got compliance on the license and it has now been shown to not, in fact, own a valid patent. I then sue your company for inbursment of the extorted amount. More clear?

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[virtualchoirboy]

Awww come on.... let us have the dream:

{Big Co} decides that they were ripped off and decides to get "compensation"
{Big Co} sues {Patent Troll Co}
{Big Co} wins, even on appeal
Lawyers everywhere drop dead from heart attacks because now they have to make sure they have legitimate grounds for suing someone......

ahhhh... the bliss would almost be too much.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Zigg]

Sure thing. Well, if they weren't, y'know, suing people they believed were violating the law by infringing their copyright.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[Almost-Retired]

ahhhh... the bliss would almost be too much.

Yes, but as you said almost but not quite too much. I think I could stand it anyway. :-)

--
Cheers, Gene

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[bigpicture]

I don't think that the point is missed at all, I write contracts for a living, and when the other party has "got the hammer", the contract agreement is always written in their favour. So you are not going to get a licensing agreement that allows you to sue. In fact the license agreement will probably not even be "silent" about this issue, but specifically exclude it. Lawyers might be greedy, but they are not always stupid.

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully?

[nbert]

That's funny, I never heard of the word redress before and it's not what I meant, because redress is more like a compensation for something done to you (no contract involved beforehand)
 
Regress as a word exists in English, but it's not used like I thought (I'm a non native speaker obviously). All I wanted to say is that the contract might not cover the case that SCO's claims are not right, so there wouldn't be any ground for demanding money back in this scenario. I'm sorry for causing any deep thoughts late at night and I'm open for any suggestions for an appropriate term.

The Prior Art:

[TubeSteak]

http://www.pubpat.org/672ReexamOrdered.pdf

Is US Patent No. 4,541,012 to Tescher

Just a short blurb from the reexamination order

"The request details those portions of Tescher as being relevant to claims 1-11 with suggestion that claims 12-46 are either identical to, or obvious implementations of claims 1-11, the detailed claim chart for independant claim 1 is shown on pages 3-4 of the request"

Basically, Tescher preempts claims 1-11 of Chen and claims 12-46 of Chen's patent just repeat 1-11.

Re:The Prior Art:

[Anonymous Coward]

I read through that too.

The big question is: If the Tescher claims invalidate the Forgent patent, who is Tescher and what is his potential for taking up the Forgent flame...

Re:The Prior Art:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the 4,541,012 patent was granted in 1985. Is it 17 years? 20 years to expiration?

Re:The Prior Art:

[Joebert]

Wait a second.

Does this mean that the "Coding system for reducing redundancy", actually contains redundancy ?!

More funding for additional work at application

[PornMaster]

I'd really like to see some more resources dedicated in the initial granting process rather than simply cheer the decisions to review. Allowing someone to patent an unoriginal idea contradicts the notion of promoting the useful arts which the Constitution provides for.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[Changer2002]

The problem is that Congress took away funding from the PTO, and isn't likely to give it back, in fact they take away money that the PTO makes on filing fees. The average patent examiner spends the same amount of time looking over a patent as a patent litigator will spend in one week prepping for trial. The amount of money that would have to be put into the system would be... well it just wouldn't happen. There are other alternatives that have been proposed but just adding money/people probably isn't the answer.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[jonwil]

The answer is to get experts in the field involved in examining patents before they are "rubber stamped".
If people that knew what they were talking about technically (and preferablly leaglly too) were involved in deciding if a patent was valid or not, we wouldnt see so many crappy patents. Enough people would be required to look at it such that people wouldnt be able to say "no, its not valid" because they have a vested interest in being able to use that stuff and not pay for it (also, a simple "no" wouldnt suffice, actual links to prior art or whatever else would need to be presented)

Also, introduce a clause in the rules that says that if a patent is found invalid (either in the initial investigation or later on by a court), the patent holder has to pay up to the PTO.

The idea of "you have to demonstrate your patent somehow" (e.g. for a patent on something like an encryption algorithim, you have to demonstrate working code for it) would also help.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[Almost-Retired]

I'd really like to see some more resources dedicated in the initial granting process rather than simply cheer the decisions to review. Allowing someone to patent an unoriginal idea contradicts the notion of promoting the useful arts which the Constitution provides for.

Well, that was the idea when the USTPO was re-organized quite a few years ago, to make it self-supporting. But somehow, the fees charged never seem to wind up buying more reviewers with technical knowledge suitable for the job, or computers enough to facilitate a speedy search for prior art in their own database.

However, I'm certainly not privy to their budget details, and it may be that the fees charged are what they perceive the traffic will bear, but which are still insufficient to realize the grand dream of both an efficient opertion, and smart enough people on staff to see through all the bullshit in the average patent application, which as we all know has been reduced to boilerplate language over the last 150 years, the soul purpose of which is to confuse and confound the examiner into thinking this particular kitchen match is a brand new invention just because this one has a blue head where the normal ones have a red head.

Folks who can chew through that stuff in a timely manner and make the right decision, doing the prior art searches et all, should, in order to protect the innocent, be first at least 3 star genius's, tested as such before they are even offered the position AND be paid enough to keep them for long enough to actually get some usefull work from them. I'd estimate that as being at least $250k/annum minimum in todays market for such people.

Yeah, I'm a dreamer who thinks it might actually work.

--
Cheers, Gene

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[Sfing_ter]

Impossible and Implausible! This makes perfect sense, so how could you even conceive that this idea would work with/be allowed near Government or Government Bureaucracy?
Pffft.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[typical]

The answer is to get experts in the field involved in examining patents before they are "rubber stamped".
If people that knew what they were talking about technically (and preferablly leaglly too) were involved in deciding if a patent was valid or not, we wouldnt see so many crappy patents.

Too expensive. What would it cost to get good computer scientists doing something not-so-fun as examining patent applications?

Maybe make it part of a deal -- "get your PhD on a government scholarship, but spend part of your time for the next couple years doing patent review"?

Also, introduce a clause in the rules that says that if a patent is found invalid (either in the initial investigation or later on by a court), the patent holder has to pay up to the PTO.

I'd like that, but I'm not under any illusions as to this working. First, patent filers would protest -- they're being subjected to risk for an impossible search (I agree that the search for conflicting work is impossible, which is part of the reason that I dislike the existing legal minefield where anyone might accidentally infringe on a patent for doing perfectly straightforward work). Second, how much does the patent holder pay? Microsoft doesn't care if it has to pay $10K. It paid more in fees to its in-house lawyers to get the patent pushed through in the first place. On the other hand, Joe the Independent Inventor working out of a garage may see $5K as a harsh blow to his finances.

The idea of "you have to demonstrate your patent somehow" (e.g. for a patent on something like an encryption algorithim, you have to demonstrate working code for it) would also help.

Yes. There is very little reason that I can think of for this not to be a requirement. I don't think that it solves much, though -- my concern is not people filing impossible patents or patents that are very difficult for those people to implement, but simply taking areas of ideas and holding monopolies over them without then returning advances in technology that would not have otherwise been made.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[Oligonicella]

The idea of "you have to demonstrate your patent somehow" (e.g. for a patent on something like an encryption algorithim, you have to demonstrate working code for it) would also help.

Wouldn't work, which is why it's not there. Build your own new MRI machine before patenting it? My patented code is for a Honeywell mainframe, you want me to lug one to the PO? No sir.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[virtualchoirboy]

The idea of "you have to demonstrate your patent somehow" (e.g. for a patent on something like an encryption algorithim, you have to demonstrate working code for it) would also help.

Yes. There is very little reason that I can think of for this not to be a requirement. I don't think that it solves much, though -- my concern is not people filing impossible patents or patents that are very difficult for those people to implement, but simply taking areas of ideas and holding monopolies over them without then returning advances in technology that would not have otherwise been made.

Of course, there will be people that say things like "what about all the tech that goes into a cell phone" (or similar). There are protocols and communications and blah blah blah. They have a valid point, but only to a degree. Each piece could still be implemented in a limited scale. If not, how the heck do you test your idea? How do you even begin to prove it can work if you can't implement it in some way?

I guess there is always the "trust me, I'm a doctor" approach, but I don't think that will get you very far.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[kansas1051]

"If people that knew what they were talking about technically (and preferably legally too) were involved in deciding if a patent was valid or not, we wouldnt see so many crappy patents."

I totally agree, this is the function the USPTO is intended to perform. Unfortunately, as technology as increased the ability of patent examiners to have comprehensive knowledge of the art has decreased, which results in crappy patents. The solution is obviously to allow the USPTO to keep more of the revenue it generates and hire experts, which is always resisted by Congress.

Also, introduce a clause in the rules that says that if a patent is found invalid (either in the initial investigation or later on by a court), the patent holder has to pay up to the PTO.

This would only be equitable if a person had to pay because they deceived the USPTO. Patents are often found invalid based on prior art documents that no one in the US has ever had knowledge of. For instance, I once worked on a case where a patent to a U.S solo inventor was invalidated on the basis of an obscure Japanese magazine article. The inventor had never been to japan and didnt know how to read Japanese. Why would it be fair to punish him for not having a photographic recollection of everything ever written in the world?

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[mdfst13]

I'm not sure that the problem is even the "smartness" of the people doing the reviews. The problem is that they have about four hours to find a reason to deny a patent.

It's easy enough to sit around /. and say "This patent sucks." It's much harder to encapsulate said suckage into a reason to deny a patent.

In the modern world, I think that it is impractical to expect anyone, no matter how smart, to be able to find the weak spot in a patent in a mere four hours.

IMO, we would be better off going the other way. Make the initial patent application just a listing. Instead of writing Patent Pending, write Patent Requested. Then, when they try to use the patent, the challenge comes from the recipient. Also, patent infringement notices should all be sent *through* the patent office (for another fee). I.e. the workflow would be

File patent application.
Notify others that you feel that they are infringing.
The defendant (who is presumably in the field; otherwise how are they infringing) researches prior art and challenges the patent.
Both sides present their evidence to each other.
If neither has admitted the other is correct, they can then go to a review at the patent office. The loser of the review pays the review fees.

The fundamental problem with the current system is that it is not possible for a single person to perform such a review at the proper level of importance. Some of these patents are requesting multi-million dollar fees. Some would be happy with $10,000. How do you support both uses with a one size fits all fee?

If you are really committed to the idea of an up front application review, perhaps we should reconsider how patents can be used. E.g. what if a patent application also had to include the licensing fees? I.e. I might file a patent and say that users could pay either $10,000 for an unlimited license or $1 per use (with a cap of $10,000; i.e. the 10,001st use would be free). The applicant needs to set

1. The max fee per user ($10,000 in this example).
2. The fee per use ($1).
3. The max to be collected.

Every purchaser of the unlimited license would become a part owner of the remainder of the patent. Once the original patenter gets the max amount to be collected, all the licensers (to that point) now own the patent and may license it to others *up to* the amount that they themselves paid. Once they all have licensed the amount they have paid (or 14 years, whichever comes first), the patent expires.

Now, here's the kicker: base the patent application fee on the max to be collected amount. E.g. 5%. That will determine how much effort the patent office puts into researching the patent. As a result, people who can realistically expect their patent to be the next big thing will pay huge fees up front, will get lots of patent review, and will presumably make back the money in licensing. People who put in $5000 worth of work and are hoping for $10,000 in fees will pay much smaller application fees, get little patent review, but will not cost that much.

I would still prefer the delayed review. I think that it is fairer to all concerned and puts much less burden on the patent office. This is an example of an alternative.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft doesn't care if it has to pay $10K. It paid more in fees to its in-house lawyers to get the patent pushed through in the first place.

I can almost guarantee the average Microsoft patent didn't cost them more than $10k worth of in-house counsel. Patents they farmed out to firms may be closer to $15k for prosecution, but anything that stayed in-house was likely much cheaper. In-house counsel is salaried, not a clock-watcher.

Re:More funding for additional work at application

[lenehey]

The problem with forcing a patent holder to prove that a patent is valid, rather than force the accused infringer that it is not valid, is that it is really impossible to prove that a patent is valid. This would require proving that there is no prior art. How would you do that? What you could do is keep the system as it is, but make the loser pay all reasonable costs associated with the litigation. That would make a person with a weak patent think twice before asserting it.

Now Linux can support JPEG!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait, it already does. What's the difference between MP3s and JPEGs, such that we'll violate patents for JPEGs but not for MP3s?

Re:Now Linux can support JPEG!

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, one is music and one is images

Re:Now Linux can support JPEG!

[jonwil]

The difference is that people who know what they are talking about both legally and techically have said that the MPEG patents are valid (no idea if they have been tested in court or not though) but those same people (including the pubpat people) say that the JPEG patent in question is not valid.

Also, a lot more people have been sued for violating (or made to pay licence fees for) the MPEG patents than have been for this JPEG patent

Re:Now Linux can support JPEG!

[nothings]

The JPEG standard actually includes support for an alternate entropy coding method (the last, non-lossy part of the compression applied after the lossy compression) based on something called arithmetic coding. Elements of that method were well-known to be patented, so it was not included in the widely-used basic JPEG implementation (by the Independent Jpeg Group). As such, it may have been part of the official standard, but it was not really part of the de facto standard, because it was known to be patented, so it was avoided.

I'm not sure what the deal is with this patent, although I assume it was covered in earlier stories. Maybe the patent holder agreed not to sue about it, or maybe nobody knew about it. One article linked here says "Forgent Networks Inc. acquired Compression Labs in 1997 and began an aggressive campaign of asserting the '672 patent roughly a year and a half ago, a decade after the patent was originally issued". It's closer to two decades; the patent issued in 1987 so if it were 17 years instead of 20, it would already be dead.

Re:offtopic, but you know what I'd like?

[tehwebguy]

just undigg and report stories you don't like, wait.. wrong site

Re:offtopic, but you know what I'd like?

[Anonymous Coward]

News concerning governments, patents, or corporate affairs is usually controversial (in that it can easily erupt into long flamewars). Thus, ad impressions for OSTG's sponsors.

Slashdot will not cater to one person

[idonthack]

But I think you can choose not to see certain topics in the prefrences somewhere.

PNG Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I use PNG for everything.

Hooray open source!

Re:PNG Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally I'd love to too, but the compression kinda sucks...

Re:First Post

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

nah, he's only 1336.

The difference

[ad0gg]

Mp3s make you deaf
Jpegs make you blind

Re:The difference

[TheDugong]

"Jpegs make you blind"

But only indirectly and it may just be an old wives tale.

Re:The difference

[werewolf1031]

Ack! Why does it burn when I see?!

Re:offtopic, but you know what I'd like?

[pharwell]

I guess a story about a guy who builds his own gadget based on a sci-fi fantasy movie and gets into a patent war with a corporation, and takes the case to the Supreme Court wouldn't suffice, would it?

In other news: THERE IS A DATA COMPRESSION BLOG!

[Xonstein]

zowie

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully? NO

[asr_man]

Ummm....the likelihood that the laywers will collect as much or more than the license fees involved? The fact that "extortion" won't be a factor in the case?

Prior Art demonstrated on ASCII

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just like everyone to know, I've filed a claim of prior art in the name of a long deceased relative on ASCII, and every poster here may be in violation of my patent. Please remove your posts at once or I will be disposed to take legal action. Your IP has been logged.

Knowledge of patent encumberance.

[jbn-o]

Neither of the commenters to date take your question seriously, so I'll make a guess: at the time software was developed to encode and decode JPEG, it was not common knowledge that JPEGs were ostensibly patent-encumbered. As far as I know, no unencumbered alternative to JPEG was developed. But it is widely understood among those who deal with these matters that MP3 is patent-encumbered and that we should use and encourage others to use the apparently unencumbered (and higher quality, besides) Ogg Vorbis instead.

MP3 - JPEG difference

[nachtkap]

as far as i know MP3 was developed by non-private german institute (possibly frauenhoffer institute could be wrong tho) and was made available to the puplic for free. i think it is/was the same german institute that also works on decoding the human genome. after they decoded a certain gen they would release the data about the gen thus blocking anyone else from patenting it. as for the legal side of it....its been a while but i seem to remember that nobody can patent something that is puplic property. releasing something for everybody to access = it becomes puplic property

Re:MP3 - JPEG difference

[Anonymous Coward]

I am going to -presume- that English is not your first language, and correct you gently. If I am wrong and English is your first language, you -really- need the refresher.

-The first letter of each sentence should begin with a capital letter. Like this. See how that works?

-Proper nouns, such as "Frauenhoffer" and "German", should also begin with a capital.

-Words like "though" (you spelled it "tho") can be a bit confusing, as they -look- phonetically correct the way you spelled them, but are not. Similarly, "puplic" should be "public". I have no idea what you meant by "gen", normally that's used as a shorthand of "generation" but that makes little sense there. Generally better to use a full, clear word then shorthand, unless you're taking dictation or similar where speed is at a premium and only you will read the shorthand copy. ("Tho" is also used as shorthand sometimes, but should not be used in any work that's intended for public consumption.)

Hope that's helpful to you!

Pondering...

[jmorris42]

> But it is widely understood among those who deal with these matters that MP3 is
> patent-encumbered and that we should use and encourage others to use the apparently
> unencumbered (and higher quality, besides) Ogg Vorbis instead.

Yes, MPEG was always upfront that they were pooling patents and doing the RAND thing. But I have a question. When do they start expiring? I remember a VCD like tech (OS9-68K based, Phillips, brain cramp on the name now.... CDI?) in the late 1980's and VCD (MPEG1 video, MPEG1 layer 1 audio) itself not much later. MPEG1 layer 2 was the failed Phillips Compact Digital Cassette in what, 1992? Question is what is the date on the patents, especially of course on MPEG 1 layer 3 audio and MPEG2 video. AC3 audio is probably several years newer so the last part of DVD and HD-TV won't be public for a bit.

I'm thinking we need to find out and start a countdown, much like everyone did for RSA and the GIF patents.

Re:Pondering...

[evilviper]

Yes, MPEG was always upfront that they were pooling patents and doing the RAND thing.

MPEG != MP3

When do they start expiring? I remember a VCD like tech (OS9-68K based, Phillips, brain cramp on the name now.... CDI?) in the late 1980's and VCD (MPEG1 video, MPEG1 layer 1 audio) itself not much later. MPEG1 layer 2 was the failed Phillips Compact Digital Cassette in what, 1992?

MPEG-1 video and audio (layer 1/2) patents have long since expired.

Question is what is the date on the patents, especially of course on MPEG 1 layer 3 audio and MPEG2 video.

There's no easy answer... Patents for any MPEG standard are filed over years and years. The question is, are the newer ones entirely essential, or can you leave the newest patents out, and be free and clear much earlier? I don't know MP3 or MPEG-2 well-enough to say for sure, but I'll hazard a few guesses...

For MP3 I'll take the easy way out and rely on someone else's research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:MP3#patent

For the liberal estimate, it will probably be legal in about 3 years if you are willing to leave out some newer/better coding methods that will not be free until about 7 years later.

For MPEG-2 I used the MPEGLA essentiallity PDF and the USPTO to look-up a sampling of what they have listed. It looks like MOST of the patent list was granted before 1994, which means 2011 for my liberal estimate. Many of the newer and presumably more advanced coding methods were granted before 2000, with a few as late as 2004, which means 2017 to be pretty safe, and 2021 to be completely in the clear.

Those (later) years may be under-estimated by as much as 3 years (very unlikely), as it would have been much more work to compare the filing date to the grant date, check which rules would apply during those years, and extend expiration dates as necessary.

AC3 audio is probably several years newer so the last part of DVD and HD-TV won't be public for a bit.

You've hit on something that pisses me off immensely. It would seem that Dolby is paying a lot of bribes for exclusive-use in every US standard. For DVDs, the patent-free MP2 audio can be used in PAL countries (as well as AC3), while it is not allowed on NTSC discs or NTSC players. In the DVB digital video standard (which is used pretty-much everywhere except but North America, Japan, and Korea) MP2 audio is allowed (as well as AC3) but in the ATSC standard, AC3 is defined, and MP2 is not allowed at all.

What the hell is that? Including a second simple audio codec wouldn't raise the cost of the hardware at all. Yet, patent-free audio is shunned in the USA, in favor of exclusive use of AC3. Sure, AC3 sounds better, but not significantly, and there's just no reason to exclude MP2.

For video, I don't understand why VP3 hasn't been used by anybody. On2 released all rights to it specifically so that it would be used in the ATSC standard, instead of patent-encumbered MPEG-2. How about the DVB standard, which wasn't as far along as ATSC? How about HD-DVD/Blu-Ray? How about DirecTV, which is going to start using the very expensive h.264, when VP3 (released patent-free in Sep 2001) is actually nearly as good. GAH!

I'm thinking we need to find out and start a countdown, much like everyone did for RSA and the GIF patents.

The problem is that the RSA and GIF (LZW) patents were just that, a single patent for each. With MP3 there are over a dozen, and for MPEG-2 there are HUNDREDS. Which one are you going to count-down to? You'd need (eg.) Fabrice Bellard or Michael Niedermayer (who wrote the ffmpeg/libavcodec MPEG-2 codec) to go through the list of MPEG-2 patents, in detail, to determine which ones are largely necessary, and which ones can be easily omitted. All that just to find the appropriate date to count-down to...

Here's a better idea... Just use MPEG-1/VP3/Theora/Dirac/Snow and Vorbis, and don't worry about MPEG-2/MP3.

Re:Pondering...

[Anonymous Coward]

The MP3 patents that Phillips et al have been enforcing are 5,214,678, 5,323,396, and 5,777,992. These were filed in 1990 and expire in 2010-2011.

Re:In other news: THERE IS A DATA COMPRESSION BLOG

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, here's the whole thing: => . <=

patent jpegs?

[digitallysick]

I dont think that would be a good idea, everyone would use another format instead.

Re:You ins3nsitive cloD?!

[josepuerto]

what are the differences between png and jpg?

The prior art is a patent from one year earlier

[wherrera]

The PDF seems to indicate that the "prior art" is another patent, one that is only prior by one year. Does this mean that the prior patent's holder can ask for royalties based on the older patent? This does not seem to place the jpeg format fimly back in the public domain.

Re:The prior art is a patent from one year earlier

[Belfy]

From the article:

For various reasons, many of the patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("PTO") actually contain no innovation. Such patents effectively allow private actors to recapture ideas that were previously in the public domain. PUBPAT protects the public domain from being recaptured in new patents. PUBPAT's primary tool for protecting the public domain is filing requests for re-examination with the PTO. A reexam request is the formal mechanism for asking the PTO to revoke an issued patent on the grounds that its idea is not new, but is instead nothing more than a reformulation of information that was already public.

Re:The prior art is a patent from one year earlier

[crazyjimmy]

As near as I can tell, the reason this patent (Tescher 4,541,012) is important is that it has EXPIRED (as of September, 2005... nice timing that). By invalidating the later patent, it basically drops the JPEG format into open domain.

However, let me make this perfectly clear: IANAL (Especially not a patent lawyer).

--Jimmy

Re:The prior art is a patent from one year earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

I anal, too, but what could that possibly have to do with patents?

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully? NO

[werewolf1031]

The fact that "extortion" won't be a factor in the case?

Say, that's a nice patent ya got there. Shame if something were to... happen to it.

Re:You ins3nsitive cloD?!

[Jesus_666]

PNG is lossless, JPG is lossy.
Deriving from that, JPEG usually produces the smaller images, especially with photos.
PNG allows for binary transparency and transparency via alpha channel, JPEG doesn't support transparency.
PNG supports color correction, JPEG doesn't.
PNG has many ways of compressing an image, JPEG has one. (This makes the use of PNG optimizers like OptiPNG a good idea - some programs tend to use dumb compression settings for PNG.)
JPEG is fully supported by most browsers, PNG is mostly supported (especially the alpha chanel makes problems with IE PNG is extensible, JPEG isn't.
JPEG is patent-ncumbered, PNG isn't.

Re:You ins3nsitive cloD?!

[werewolf1031]

what are the differences between png and jpg?

JPEG images are "lossy" meaning that some data (image quality) is sacrificed for the sake of higher compression (smaller file size and thus higher download speeds). PNG's are "lossless", so while the integrity of the image is preserved perfectly, this results in a larger file size. It's a trade-off. For the sake of not alienating dial-up users, I personally prefer JPEG for displaying my artwork online, even though image quality takes a (moderate) hit in the end result compared to the original image.

One other advantage of JPEG over PNG is the near-uniform rendering of JPEG files across all known graphics-capable browsers, unlike the PNG format which renders quite differently from one browser to another, especially with regards to transparency alpha channels. For ex., Firefox renders transparency (alpha) data in a PNG correctly, while Internet Explorer completely ignores the alpha channel, and thus erroneously renders the image with no transparency at all. While the 8-bit (256-grayscale) transparency and transluscency of PNG files are far superior to the all-or-nothing per-pixel transparency of GIF images, the latter has far less universal support than the former, which unfortunately negates many of the PNG format's inherant advantages.

Re:offtopic, but you know what I'd like?

[alx5000]

Just sci-fi, fantasy, DYI tech, and gadgets.

Do Yourself In?

You're not one of... those guys , are you??

Its been around since more than 7 months now

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a link to their New Year post

6 Months of Compression News
<URL:http://www.c10n.info/archives/302>

Re:Could they be sued? succesfully? NO

[c_forq]

That game in your sig looks super sweet. I am downloading it now, and looking forward to playing it. Good luck with the progress on it and I hope to give some input.

Its been around since... (link fixed)

[Anonymous Coward]

Its been around since more than 7 months now
Here is a link to their New Year post

6 Months of Compression News
http://www.c10n.info/archives/302

JPEG expiring this year.

[tbird81]

Well patent 4698672 was first filed in October 1986. So add twenty years, and that's 2006.

The date on the patent document says October 6, 1987. But I'm sure it's 20 years after filing, not processing.

It seems like a last ditch effort to scrounge for money. Because in 9 months in won't matter anymore.

If you get someone pregnant tonight, you could celebrate the birth of your child on the same day as JPEG becomes free (as in no-threats-of-lawsuits).

Even photos?

[tbird81]

PNG isn't really designed for compression of photography. It's great that it's lossless, but this is not rarely necessary in real life.

At 90% JPEG compression, (which is pretty high quality) you'll have a .jpg file less than half the size of a 24-bit PNG.

PNG is good for diagrams, and things with large patches of solid colour. It doesn't use the "eye-trickery" of JPEGs, so will never get as good a filesize.

File size is still important. Even though diskspace is cheap, pictures are getting bigger. The 7 MP cameras now on the market will create 2.5MB JPEGs, this must amount to 40MB as PNGs.

That's a lot of wasted space, and if you want to share photos, it's a lot of wasted bandwidth. Most photos weren't accurate enough to begin with to justify using lossless compression.

Re:Even photos?

[colin_young]

Not a photographer are you? There are lots of reasons I want to use lossless formats. And how do you figure capturing 7 million pixels is going to take over 40 million bytes? Most cameras have 12 bit sensors, so at 2 bytes per pixel, we're talking at most 14MB and even that can be reduced quite a bit with lossless compression. Admittedly I'm not familiar with the technicalities of the PNG format, but I'm pretty sure it's not that inefficient.

Re:Even photos?

[tbird81]

haha,
you got me there. I don't know where 40MB came from. Pulled it out of somewhere i guess.

A random (low detail) photo taken with a 7.1MP camera (at 3072x2304 pixels), takes up about 20MB of memory loaded in photoshop (using 24bpp). This can be saved as a lossless PNG at 7.5MB, or as a high-quality JPEG (85 PS 'Save for Web' quality) at 2MB.

I'm not a photographer, and i realise that JPEG saving will decrease quality. And I know that an image should be compressed lossily only at the last step. There is a point of having lossless compression, but using 3x the filespace for and image that you're not going to do anything further with, seems like a waste of space.

Comparing the difference between a raytraced PNG version and a 85-quality JPEG of the same picture shows a few minor changes around some edges, but even at a high zoom, it is impossible to tell which was the original.

Since most low-to-mid range consumer digital cams store files as jpeg anyway, it's best to leave it in that format. Converting to PNG isn't going to improve.

Re:offtopic, but you know what I'd like?

[evilviper]

You're not one of... those guys , are you??

NOBODY is one of those guys... They're practically all just pure bullshit, made-up rumors, that never actually happened.

Maybe, innovation will start again

[mi]

The algorithm's limbo has left libjpeg.so largely unmodified for a decade or so now. The most notable additions are the EXIF support and the addition of some more color-spaces in the version shipped by Sun inside Java's libjpeg.

What is sorely missing, though, is the way to crop and do 90, 180, 270 degree rotation without decoding/encoding (and thus without additional loss of quality). The jpegtran part of the free JPEG-distribution can do this, but the library itself remains too low-level and all graphics applications I know use the lossy decoding/encoding method.

Hopefully, once the patent-limbo is resolved, the "reference implementation" currently used by almost everybody will get some innovation into it. And I don't mind the patents themselves -- it is just this one's "we might decide to enforce it," that irks me.

Another MPEG question

[gr8_phk]

Since HDTV uses MPEG 2 in the US, and the government has mandated its use... Could that invalidate the patents here? I know similar things have happened with copyrights being revoked (when the material was encoded into law by reference or some such). IANAL, and apparently this argument doesn't work for MPEG. Any "IP" lawyers out there care to explain exactly when and how this comes into play?

Thanks

Re:Could they be sued? successfully?

[bigpicture]

And this is still not air tight enough for the greedy patent trolls and lawyers, they want the "first to invent" turned into the "first to file" there-by invalidating any "prior art" defences.

But the patent system is there to protect inventors from invention theft, and there-by foster innovation. It works pretty well to foster greed don't you think? Maybe the patent system is an anachronism, that has lived past the end of its useful life?