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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."
Is US Patent No. 4,541,012 to Tescher
Just a short blurb from the reexamination orderBasically, Tescher preempts claims 1-11 of Chen and claims 12-46 of Chen's patent just repeat 1-11.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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
"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.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
Digital Citizen
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.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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.
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.
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).
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.
MPEG != MP3
MPEG-1 video and audio (layer 1/2) patents have long since expired.
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.
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!
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant