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

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: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

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.

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.