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USPTO Rules Fogent JPEG Patent Invalid
fistfullast33l writes "Groklaw has reported that the USPTO has ruled the broadest claims of the JPEG Patent held by Fogent to be invalid. PUBPAT, the organization that requested the review, released the news earlier today. According to PJ, the ruling will be hard to overturn as the 'submitters knew about the prior art but failed to tell the USPTO about it.'"
Wow... it's nice to know that they are at least looking at things better.
Even if they didn't know about the prior art, why should it affect the ruling if prior art was involved? Since they knew about prior art but didn't report it, they should be fined.
These days you could probably get a patent for a "process of expelling excess gas generated by metabolic processing of protein and accumulated in the large intestine and colon."
Why does it take them so d@mn long to accomplish this in the first place? Even when a patent is finally ruled invalid -- and should have never been granted in the first place -- it seems it happens only after years of legal damage. No one is served well by this, except the lawyers.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Considering Microsoft's new graphics file format, an unencumbered JPG format is a rather handy thing to have out there.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I vote for jailed. Fines are just a part of doing business, and do not appear to be much of a deterrent these days.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Especially if you promote it as a new Energy Source.
Heck, you can probably get VC funding for it as well.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What they should have done is patent "Web 2.0"....
all the money they've been paid in licenses, plus interest?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The patent has not been completely ruled invalid. Some of the claims have not been addressed by the USPTO according to Forgent
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
US Patent office makes competent ruling! News at 11!
I just burned all my JPEGs...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Or revoke their corporate charter and bar the executives from doing business again. I'm all in favour of invoking this sort of punishment - it beats the hell outa fines, and ensures fewer repear offenders. Call it a corporate "death penalty", and I'm sure that it'll find support in the conservative parts of the US :-)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
It was. Except the licensing was a little too strict and the format died without interest. Who'd invest in making it their primary format if next day the owner of the format could charge them money for using it?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
How many times do we need to go through this before it is clear that the patent system, wrt software, is broken. I am *NOT* necessarily against patents for software, but it is just about impossible to do prior art, becuase there is so much out there for a few years and then gone. Worse, the examiners don't have enough background to do the job, etc.
The peer review system that is being discussed sounds like a step in the right direction. There also needs to be some significantly less costly way to deal with claims of infringement and the ndefense than the Courts. Small companies can't afford to defend their patents or to challenge someone with deep pockets trying to enforce a patently bogus patent!
Don't forget that the primary purpose of corporations is to avoid personal liability and responsibility. It is both difficult to jail a corporation or jail individuals working for a corporation for corporate misbehavior.
It's Forgent, not Fogent.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
After we convert our cars to run on this new energy source will there be a public outcry each time the price of a slider goes up at whitecastle?
This thoroughly details which claims of the patent have been rejected (page 5) and which claims were found patentable (page 26). http://www.pubpat.org/672OA060525.pdf
1. Yes, the patent system is severely broken, and it's flawed. Yes, the European version is better. Yes, patents (my grandfather had a few) should only last 17 years period, as the intention is to force publication of such information/concepts/executions so that everyone may gain from such public knowledge through a time-limited license, and the extensions we currently grant work against such concepts. But, let's face it, unless you have a few billion dollars, they will ignore what we say on this matter, for they are corrupt.
2. We need more public patents - and we need places like universities and colleges and publicly-funded institutions to file them, or at least on renewal reclassify the patent as a public patent but administer it, with a portion of revenues being used to reform the patent system.
3. Software is not, nor should it every be, patentable. Copyright? Sure. I published freeware and shareware at the dawn of public computing (70s/80s). But not patentable, nor should business processes nor conceptual methods be patentable. It is just plain wrong.
I don't expect you to agree with me, but I think this latest USPTO ruling brings up the issue on the public JPEG usage. JPEG is from the publicly-funded Jet Propulsion Laboratories - which we pay for with taxes. Open source depends on public patents, or at worst private patents signed over to OSF and other groups to administer.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I really don't think I want to know how a handjob would be punishment.
http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ti cker=forg&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=861407
They very well could. Broad claims are harder to sustain than narrow claims.
No, the core problem wasn't with the patents, although those were bad enough. The core problems are ignorance (most people don't know what options exist), inertia (those who do often won't take advantage of them because it requires change) and stagnation (sufficient inertia kills all incentive to further develop alternatives). I would not be against compulsary education on how to be versatile, for this reason.
It is hard to blame Fogent alone, when the entire national attitude is based so firmly on milking every old idea for what it's worth, whilst the populace make no effort to avoid being bilked. As with those in Dilbert who have met the "world's most desperate Venture Capitalist", it becomes hard not to just take the money and run.
This isn't to say such conduct is good or acceptable - it isn't, in my opinion. Rather, it is to say that we should be addressing the whole problem, not merely a selection of the symptoms.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
so it's Forgent not Fogent. I managed to do it in the title and the summary. [pats self on back]
Does this mean that Linux can now support JPEG, since it's now unencumbered by patents? Hurray!!
PJ did not say anything about prior art. She said "PubPat's Executive Director, Dan Ravicher, says that the submitters knew about the prior art". Please at least try to pretend that Slashdot is a credible news source.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Stands for Venture Capital or Venture Capitalists. Though similar in practice to the Southeast Asian guerillas of the same name, these are native mostly to California.
Having worked with a few, I can understand the confusion.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
We will always have to go through this. As far as business interests are concerned, patents are simply assets, and sometimes extremely valuable ones. I doubt that such interests would risk the loss of such valuable assets.
For the record, I am against software patents. I'll give you an example of why.
I have the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta. The new "Ribbon" interface is perhaps the most brilliant thing to come out of Microsoft in quite a long while. It alone will likely drive sales - read upgrades - of Office if only because it exposes functionality that has been there since Office 97, but has been hidden behind a bewildering array of menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes.
Is it entirely new? No. I have seen similar interfaces on web sites.
But here is the problem: there are several programs that I could think of that would benefit from the "Ribbon". Adobe Photoshop comes immediately to mind. Imagine having a tabbed toolbar, with a tab for "Home" containing the basic tools, a tab for "Masks", one for "Channels", etc.
Of course if - or more likey, when - Microsoft patents the "Ribbon", only users of Microsoft software will benefit from it. Regardless of how much users of software from other brands might be able to benefit from it.
Copyright should be good enough for software. Patents truly stifle innovation.
The words white, chocolate and raspberry have no place on a bag of coffee.
That is not what you stated though.
You stated that this would be unreasonable punishment if they weren't convicted of a crime, that is precisely what you stated. Which is very strange since what was proposed is a punishment that could be levied in just such a case.
Of course it would be wrong to bar people from jobs in certain industries for no reason. But the idea of preventing someone convicted of a crime from doing so again, where's the problem?
Let's put it in some perspective via an example: Should a cop that abuses his power and is convicted of doing so to commit a crime be able to continue being a cop? Why shouldn't an executive convicted of something like fraud on a large scale be barred from continuing to do business in the industry they purported the crime in in the first place? Wow, a punishment that fits the crime, how novel.
No Comment.
I'm not particularly arguing FOR anything... merely arguing against the premise that the executives be somehow barred from starting up another, possibly identical, business.
Why not? Medical doctors who compromise their patients' safety for their own gain can lose their license to practice. Lawyers who break the rules of their profession can be disbarred. Stockbrokers who trade illegaly on insider information lose their license and go to jail. Scientists who plagiarize or falsify their results become pariahs in their fields, and although they are not necessarily sanctioned by the law or a licensing body, nevertheless they effectively can no longer practice. Ditto perhaps for artists, musicians, writers, etc. All of these people find some other way to make a living.
The problem, I suppose, is that in the business world, flaunting the rules without getting caught is something that one's peers often admire because it can increase profits. I'm not saying businesspeople gone bad should always be banned for life from their fields, but some kind of progressive punishment that includes a professional sanction is, I think, appropriate.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Okay, great. But hey forget JPEG. Drum it up for IW44 and DJVU. I just converted a 3.5MB .jpg to a 400K .djvu and can't tell the difference.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I've half-followed PUBPAT since its creation. I don't think I fully grasped how useful it would be when it first emerged.
It's since showed itself to be absolutely vital in the midst of this software patent madness. It's good that there's lawyers out there ready to go in to bat for us developers. No matter how smart we think we are, and regardless of how much we'd like the system to just go away and stop bothering us, it isn't going to just yet. So PUBPAT are there for us, fighting a fight that must be fought, even if it is crazy that things have got to this stage in the first place.
Assuming PUBPAT continues its fine work, it will rapidly find itself as a sort of guardian angel of the software developer -- be they OSS, FS, or even commercial writers.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Not really sure I agree with either one of you guys, however perhaps I'm just an optomist but I'd rather not think of the poliece as an "industry" per se.
It doesn't matter what you call it -- an "industry", an "estate" of society, an "institution", whatever -- the point is that individuals who have been handed authority must also accept the other side of that coin: responsibility.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
so what about all the companies sued by Forgent? do they get their money back? how about companies that went under due to Forgent suing for patent infringement? do they get restitution?
Corporations are not gtranted patents in the U.S., people are. The corporations get an assignment from their emplyees, which essentially means that the company owns the patent, but the Applicants are always one or more individuals. However, no one goes to jail over this, the patent just gets invalidated.
What Dan Ravicher was referring to is the duty to disclose any known prior art found prior to, or during patent prosecution. Courts have frequently punished patent holders for knowing failing to disclose prior art by invalidating the entire patent. This usually only happens in court when someone gets sued for patent infringement, or when a party takes the issue to court to get a declaratory judgment finding the patent invalid. Surely no one out there wants to spend the money it'd take to get this invalidated in court.
When the issue gets brought up before the PTO, they generally just invalidate the broadest claims, and narrow the scope of the patent until it's worthless.
Stands for Venture Capital or Venture Capitalists. Though similar in practice to the Southeast Asian guerillas of the same name, these are native mostly to California.
I think that's a completely inappropriate and insensitive comparison. One group acted in a completely vicious and amoral fashion: causing great suffering, imprisoning people for years, and acting with a callous disregard for human life. Whereas the other group was just a bunch of communists rebels.
The primary purpose of a corporation is the shield the owners from liability and responsibility.
The original concept idea was to encourage people to put money into business, because if it failed the owners would not be liable for any debts it left. Your liability was limited to however much you had put in.
Individuals working for a corporation are still responsible for any criminal offenses they commit or conspire to commit.
Even if the people involved are the owners their limited liability for debts was never intended as a shield for criminal behaviour.