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Forgent Settles JPEG Patent Cases
eldavojohn writes "As many of you know, the JPEG image compression is actually proprietary. This has resulted in many lawsuits between its owner, Forgent Networks, and other companies that have used it. Yesterday Microsoft and about 60 other defendants settled with Forgent to the tune of $8 million. For a company with annual revenues of $15 million, that's nothing to sneeze at. You haven't heard the last of Forgent yet, as the article states, 'It is currently pursuing claims against cable companies over a patent that it says covers technology inside digital video recorders.' Sounds like that one could be worth a little bit of cash, wouldn't you think?"
JPEG patent expired last month, so unless you were sued before, you are safe now.
The patent was previously ruled to only cover video anyway.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Proprietary software is for capitalist pigs!
It's just the man trying to keep us down!
Information wants to be free!
That's it. I'm dumping every jpeg and disabling it on my brows....
Huh. Where did everything go?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The Gimp has no problem opening and saving JPEGs but every day I hear another excuse why Totem can't play WMV / Quicktime files. I guess the difference is that someone, who didn't give a shit about patents, actually bothered to make a JPEG library.. but no-one has sat down and done the same for WMV or Quicktime or the dozen other "proprietary codecs". Now ESR is talking about working with Linspire to make it easy for Linux users to download codecs, for a fee. They're talking about putting an icon on the desktop, the user double clicks on it, a windows pops up asking for their credit card details (or whatever payment system will fly in your locale) and the codecs are downloaded and installed with no user intervention necessary. This is a great step forward compared to the hoops you have to jump through to get (unlicensed) codecs installed on Linux at the moment, but isn't it a step backwards? Wouldn't it be better to take the JPEG/GIF approach: write our own library and just ignore these people who claim we must license their patent?
How we know is more important than what we know.
gifs anf flash
They're more popular then boring old JPEG
Otherwise they will never take that system down and small developers will never have a chance (and oss will have a hard time). Patents must be abused against large companies. The bigger, the better. It shouldn't read 8 million but rather 800 million. That will be the day I will be smiling.
They made it and they better eat up.
Ravicher has been doing an excellent job of fighting for patent reform. There's a Windows Media video (ironic) of him speaking at a Santa Clara Law School function here. He outlines the reasons for patent reform and how he thinks it should be undertaken.
There's not many of 'em.
jpeg compression is nontrivial. The guy(s) that came up with it should be able to make a living off their hard work.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
It's the American way.
1) Invent a good compression algorithm and patent it
2) Make sure everyone implements it and puts in into their products
3) Sue!
4) Profit
Now we know what to put in place of the ???
Being the owners of such an important patent and winning a nice settlement I assumed that Forgent must be a premier technology company providing important advances in technology and related products to our technology driven society, so I had a look at their website and what did I find?
"Our software division, NetSimplicity makes easy-to-use, scheduling software for any need -- scheduling rooms, resources and I.T. assets."
WTF, they make scheduling software for meeting rooms?!? I think I smell patent troll.
Yeah, I've heard that there are jpg images on the Internet.
Imagine - just for a moment - that they got even a hundredth of a cent for each jpeg. They should be sitting around a pool drinking something cold and alcoholic like the mp3 guys.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
According to TFA, they acquired this patent, they didn't do the hard work themselves to create the technology. Now perhaps they're still entitled, I won't argue that point.
I'm also a bit confused by the post here that said they earn 15 million a year. According to TFA, they get 100s of millions from royalties from digital cameras. That sounds like a lot more than 15 million a year. Obviously, their lawyers messed up on this one. They settled cheap if they were really getting 1% royalties on all those cameras.
Why would they pursue cable companies? I dunno about other cable providers, but I know that with Comcast in my area, the DVR is manufactured by Motorola (6412). Wouldn't it make more sense to go after Motorola?
jpeg compression is nontrivial. The guy(s) that came up with it should be able to make a living off their hard work.
Except that Forgent did not participate in the JPEG standardization process and those who did wanted the format to be free from patent licenses. Oh, and the USPTO declared most of Forgent's claims invalid earlier this year.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Burn all JPEGs! It's a big file format anyway; you should use JPEG compression anywa..er.. hmmm. We have a problem, Houston.
And I was silly enough to think that this kind of bullshit was past us with the end of the GIF issue.
it's true.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
The baseline JPEG format is not proprietary and is not owned by Forgent.
What happened here is that Forgent sat on a patent while the JPEG format was drafted with the purpose of being open and patent-free. Compression Labs (which Forgent now owns) was a part of the JPEG committee and thus was required to disclose any patents that might deal with the format that the committee was developing. Compression Labs was silent on the matter and Forgent only decided to litigate their patent after many years of silence and after JPEG had become a standard. The patent is likely invalidated by priori art and Forgent is probably also barred by laches due to their delay in enforcing the patent.
I'd rather that no one settle with them, but the reality is that settling is probably cheaper than litigating.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
oh.
well, screw Forgent then.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
While I do agree with you, it's kind of funny how the only reason it's really worth anything is because it's used so much. And the only reason it's used so much is because people used it without paying the license fee.
Same can be said for gif and mp3... I recognize that that's no excuse, but it's kind of funny anyways. Had the patent been enforced from day zero, it wouldn't have nearly as much worth.
"The rank of your abnormal play you know eldavojohn, you write, the image compression of JPEG is monopoly really. This the owner, originated with Forgent network, and many lawsuits between the other company which uses that. Yesterday Microsoft and other defendant of approximately 60 Forgent solved in condition of the $8,000,000. With that for the company which has the annual earnings of the $15,000,000 doing sneeze is nothing. Cover technology in digital video recorder. ' Vis-a-vis the cable company on the patent which is said, as a state of the article, the end of Forgent ' as for perhaps the sound which does not hear the request which that presently has been pursued yet a little value of the cash has, you like, you don't think? "
Hmmm... weird I say, do you think?
slash image word it is seen, you say is "reciter"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I live about 6 blocks from the nuke plant - patent away boys, and good luck with that matching search - bwahahahaha!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
$8 million is plenty to sneeze at, considering it is a small fraction of what they were asking and had a 43% contingency deal with their lawyers.
You forgot the best part, which tells why we won't be hearing from them again anytime soon:
JPEG PATENT CLAIM SURRENDERED:
Forgent Networks Ends Assertion of Patent Challenged by PUBPAT
NEW YORK -- November 2, 2006 -- The Public Patent Foundation ("PUBPAT") announced today that Forgent Networks (Nasdaq: FORG) has stopped asserting its patent against the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) international standard for the electronic sharing of photo-quality images. PUBPAT successfully initiated a challenge to the patent last year and this week Forgent dropped all of its pending cases asserting the patent and stated that it would not file any other infringement claims based on the patent.
Forgent Networks acquired the '672 Patent through the purchase of Compression Labs, Inc. in 1997 and began aggressively asserting it against the JPEG standard through lawsuits and the media in 2004. PUBPAT filed its challenge to the patent in November 2005 and the Patent Office rejected the patent's broadest claims in May of this year.
"By completely ending its assertion of the '672 patent, Forgent has now finally admitted that the patent has no valid claim over the JPEG standard," said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's Executive Director. "This utter capitulation by Forgent is long overdue, but a cause for public relief nonetheless."
More information about the Forgent Networks patent formerly asserted against the JPEG standard, including a copy of the Patent Office's Office Action rejecting its broadest claims, can be found at http://www.pubpat.org/forgentjpeg.htm.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
PUBPAT has a different spin on this story, touting how Forgent has dropped all claims on the patent as a result of a successful challenge brought a year ago by PUBPAT resulting in the patent office rejecting the broadest claims last May. However, the details of the patent show that it was issued in 1987, which would mean that it expires sometime in 2007. So Forgent just settled for a final $8 million to cap off the total $110 million in revenue they have grabbed during the 10 years since they bought the company that owned the patent.
This kind of patent nonsense is primarily good only for developing countries. Places where people don't pay much attention and even less money to the rich corporations that claim to own technology.
If the patent isn't enforced then the people who aren't paying millions of dollars to use technology that is in general usage are better off relatively to those companies in the wealthy countries that are exposed to patent lawsuits (on common everyday technology).
This just encourages patent shell companies in the rich countries to file harassment lawsuits based on dubious patients against other companies in rich countries. It's an economic drag that the wealthy countries inflict upon themselves. Smart people in the developing world just ignore these lawsuits wherever they receive them. Or they just sell their products at lower costs to other developing countries.
Groklaw http://www.groklaw.net/ reports that Forgent has dropped the patent case. So what gives?
If there are only two people left on dial-up, as you allege, then you can probably afford to bring both of them up to the latest standards in Intertubing.
I'd bet money that Microsoft isn't willing to license Windows Media technologies under terms that allow sublicensing as free software for any price short of a hostile takeover, which based on current MSFT market cap would cost over 100 billion dollars (that's 11 zeroes).
The Forgent patent allegedly covered part of baseline JPEG itself, including the fused Huffman encoding of nonzero coefficients with RLE coding of runs of zeroes in the zigzag.
Groklaw doesn't mention any of this when it reported that the JPEG patent had been surrendered by Forgent. Earlier this year, USPTO reversed their position and rejected the broadest of Forgent claims after the non-profit PubPat informed the USPTO of prior art that Forgent did not disclose in their application. PubPat also pointed out that Forgent knew about the prior art since one of the inventors of the prior art was one of the inventor on three of its patents.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Is there a patent-free alternative to JPEG like OGG is to MP3 or PNG is to GIF?
Recall the troops from Iraq, then send them into the Forgent Offices, then kill with extreme prejudice everything that moves. And everything that squats cowering under a desk too.
;-)
Sure the Slashdot crowd are usually pro-civil rights, but we're sick to death of these patent parasites. Do it now! Do it for Humanity!
Then go to the US PTO and march all their employees into a big meat grinder. We can the incinerate it and use it as cattle feed.
Extreme? But don't lie. You like this idea too!
The problem with TIFF is there are so many varieties of packing data inside of it, you can barely call it a single format. Heck, you can encapsulate JPEG data inside a TIFF file, and still call it a "TIFF file."
While it's easy to make a program that writes basic-flavor TIFFs as output, it's very difficult to write a program that opens the many extant varieties of TIFF files that you might find around -- and if you don't, then users are going to assume that your program is broken, when it won't open their file.
JPEG has achieved more popularity not only because of its smaller file sizes (which TIFF can replicate, through use of lossy compression, if you choose it) but because it's a homogeneous format. You don't run into nearly as many incompatibilities between flavors of JPEGs as you do with TIFFs.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sure, one is a file format, one is a compression algorithm and the latter is a U.S. corporation that sounds like an inter-op transsexual -- but I just has a flashback.
And mplayer/vlc/etc. have supported the quicktime and MP4 containers for some time, so the newer Quicktime movies are actually "more supported", it's the older propietary ones that people were missing. XD
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I allways ask myself : why should a garbage-collector not permitted to do the same ? He retrieves your garbage at one day, and then demands money for every day in the weeks to come, 'cause "he has to make a living too" ...
How is that 110 million I saw mentioned comparable to his normal income (canceling the cost of making it) plus "a moderate profit" (as is described for patents) ?
What has become of the "building on the shoulders of others" idea ?
Currently about *every* software-patent means a stagnation in development for the rest of the world, or you must have deep pockets/tradable patents yourself : Que-up big companies, purge smaller companies/single inventors.
... by any chance?
Is it possible that Forgent has other patents that Microsoft would like to fund the litigation on?
some codecs are open, others are proprietary secrets.
JPEG was intended to be open since its inception. The JPEG specification was developed by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The full details of how to implement JPEG compression are explained in depth in the specification. Indeed, the reason the Forgent case is a scandal is because as part of the JPEG committee, they agreed not to enforce their patents against JPEG implementations. Also look at the GIF case. GIF became very popular despite LZW being patented, because people didn't know it was patented - they thought the whole thing was an open standard. People like to implement open standards.
By contrast, there's absolutely no documentation on Microsoft's proprietary codecs. To get any documentation, you have to reverse engineer them, which requires immense patience and diligence in effort. With JPEG, the reverse engineering and writing up the documentation has already been done for you.
If you look at the video compression world, you'll see one trend - codecs with published specifications have multiple implementations, proprietary codecs rarely even have one implementation outside the original.
One reason for this is that a specification carefully lays out what's essential and what's not, so programmers have freedom to implement things how they like. With proprietary codecs, everything is based on reverse engineering, so you have to be cautious about saying "we don't need this part", because that's just a guess, it's not set in stone.
Also, writing a specification is difficult, and it makes the writers think twice about their code. So specifications tend to be clean and well-designed. With proprietary code, any old shit can be thrown in because the expectation is that nobody will ever see it. Fixes on top of fixes on top of fixes can create hundreds of ugly corner cases that have to be faithfully repeated in any further implementation.
Finally, there is the legal aspect of it. Many codecs, both proprietary and open, have patents on them. However, the patents aren't the problem - the litigousness of the patent holder is. In the case of open standards, all patent holders involved agree RAND (reasonable and non discriminatory) licensing - if I want to implement an MP3 decoder, I buy a copy of the standard, then agree to pay the MP3 patent holders $0.10 per unit sold. The MP3 patent holders might try to make an example of you if you ignore their patents, but they would prefer just to get you signed up to their licensing scheme. On the other hand, the company holding patents on their proprietary codec might want to take you for everything you've got, in order to defend their technology and keep it proprietary - they have everything to lose if their proprietary, secret codec gets opened.
Does my bum look big in this?
I would almost agree, but if I can make a simple jpeg compression in class using Matlab, then i would wonder about its worthiness as a patent. Also, any format, for it to be accepted, needs to be free so that It gains acceptance. I don't feel like people should make money off formats, it seems somehow wrong.
It's like this Einstein dude who just wrote, like, e=mc^2. And they call him genious. Even I can write taht down.
I thought that was a brand of peanut butter. So what's this, a file format that sticks to the roof of your hard drive?
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
JPEG compression is nontrivial. Forgent's patent on a particular twist of run-length-encoding is not.
Nontrivial yes, but it's arguable if the novelty rises to the level of something patentable. Compression algorithms based on energy-compressing transformations are nothing new, and JPEG was merely the first format to standardize a particular algorithm. The real hard work of JPEG was banging out a spec and agreeing on particulars like the exact layout of blocks, the exact values of quantization coefficients, etc. Very hard work I agree, but the basic idea which makes the whole thing work -- the idea of applying a DCT to concentrate image energy into bands and aggressively quantizing those bands -- was around before JPEG.
I've tried to find the actual patent online, but USPTO seems to be down at the moment and apparently my Google-fu is not good enough. So I can only guess as to the contents of the patent. But most compression-related patents apply to very particular aspects of the compression process, such as the particular method used for arithmetic encoding of a particular value, or some such. I pretty much guarantee that the patent does NOT cover the basic idea of energy-compressing transformations, which are the real meat of how JPEG does what it does.
Don't get too over-awed by the math. JPEG is clever but it's not exactly General Relativity.
The post (and article) mentions a claim that they hold a patent to PVR technology; specifically "Computer controlled video system allowing playback during recording" according to their patent filing. The patent does seem to cover the appropriate technology... but what's this I see? A September 2001 date? Hmm... a quick Wikipedia search turns up references to the initial release of Tivo and ReplayTV back in 1999. I think what we have here is a clear case of prior art, so sorry Forgent... I think it's time to pack up your tent.
jpeg compression is nontrivial. The guy(s) that came up with it should be able to make a living off their hard work.
JPEG compression is trivial. Split the file into 8x8 blocks, line the pixels up diagonally and take the DCT. Divide each value of the DCT by a value from the quantization matrix (which forces high frequency information into small ranges), and then compress with a huffman tree. It's definitely more trivial than, say, vorbis or theora. It's not even the state of the art in image compression anymore. 25 year patents are absolutely stupid.
’672 has expired, but the patent owner has 6 years to file a suit. All they need to do to prove their case is that the violation occurred before the patent expired. They don't have to sue before the patent expires--they have 6 years to do that.