JPEG: worth a 1000 words
p2pnet.net News:- These days, everyone in the established commercial sector is suing everyone else, or thinking about it, and the latest to get in on the act is Compression Labs.
Remember back when it could take literally hours to load a digital image because of the size?
Then among other technologies, along came .jpg or .jpeg – short for ‘Joint Photographic Experts Group’ – with compression abilities that allowed images to be seriously reduced without losing definition
Forgent Networks owns Compression Labs which in turn owns the patent on .jpg and now Compression Labs is suing a whole raft of companies for infringing the patent.
Forgent “has initiated litigation against 31 companies for infringement of United States Patent No. 4,698,672 (the ’672 Patent) in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division,” it says on its web site here.
“Over the last two years, Forgent’s intellectual property business has generated approximately $90 million from licensing the ’672 Patent to 30 different companies in Asia, Europe and the United States. Forgent has sought to reach agreements on numerous occasions with all these companies, but as of today, none of the defendants have chosen to license.”
But the Federal Trade Commission wonders if Compression Labs, “played fair during the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) standards-setting process for JPEG, which took place in the late 1980s and very early 1990s,” says OverClockers here.
“If it decides the company acted improperly, for example by not disclosing its patent application, the FTC could ask the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to invalidate the patent.
“If this is the case, all of the defendants could be let off the hook.”
Lined up as defendants are: Adobe Systems, Agfa Corporation, Apple Computer , Axis Communications Incorporated, Canon USA, Concord Camera Corporation , Creative Labs Incorporated, Dell Incorporated, Eastman Kodak Company, Fuji Photo Film Co USA, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Gateway Inc, Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corp, JASC Software, JVC Americas Corporation, Kyocera Wireless Corporation, Macromedia Inc, Matsushita Electric Corporation of America, Oce’ North America Incorporated, Onkyo Corporation, PalmOne Inc, Panasonic Communications Corporation of America, Panasonic Mobile Communications Development Corporation of USA, Ricoh Corporation, Riverdeep Incorporated (d.b.a. Broderbund), Savin Corporation, Thomson SA, Toshiba Corporation and Xerox Corporation.
Well, they say a picture is worth 1,000 words. So what with inflation, etc …
April 24th, 2004 at 6:05 am
that is just stupid!
April 24th, 2004 at 6:10 am
ok, this site is going to say that i am a coward for posting a reply because i refuse to give up my email address? Worthless bunch of spammers! I thought the point of the story is “how stupid can a company be?” I think they have proven a point about this site, STUPID!
regards,
ananymous coward.
April 24th, 2004 at 6:12 am
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yes no
April 24th, 2004 at 6:18 am
I think it’s pretty funny. You a stupid.
April 24th, 2004 at 6:21 am
Should I read anything in the fact that Microsoft is not listed on the list of companies to be sued in thid JPEG infringement line-up…?
April 24th, 2004 at 8:13 am
no, what microsoft product uses jpg to compress images?
April 24th, 2004 at 1:29 pm
Microsoft paint.
April 24th, 2004 at 1:53 pm
*lol* I never use paint, so I just checked, you’re quite right. I bet those morons sueing never opened microsoft paint before either…. Or they’re just scared of M$. I’ll go email them and let them know
*LMAO* @ the loser above getting pissed about the coward thing
April 24th, 2004 at 3:03 pm
JPEG is not a lossless compressor, it is in fact lossy, which means data is lost in compression.
thats why theres a tradeoff between size and quality when using a jpeg compressor.
April 24th, 2004 at 4:03 pm
most of microsoft products use jpg format, the compression patient isn’t just for making the file, it’s for using the algorithm. Take a look at the ads to your left and right, I bet most of them are jpg(s), you can use a jpg as wallpaper on your desktop, you can use a jpg in any office product … the list is endless. I’m hoping the judge throws it out and forces jpg to become public domain, or the computer world just stops using them and their other software products and puts them out of business as a “that will teach you” or even better a hostile take over by M$ then M$ does the right thing and makes jpg public domain.
April 24th, 2004 at 4:44 pm
No, this is stupid:
http://www.stupidstuff.org
April 24th, 2004 at 7:10 pm
The article says:
“Forgent’s intellectual property business has generated approximately $90 million from licensing the ’672 Patent to 30 different companies in Asia, Europe and the United States.”
Microsoft is probably one of the companies paying them. Maybe they can help with the lawsuit as well.
April 24th, 2004 at 10:48 pm
This type of thing is what got PNG started (because of LZW.)
If the “people” want to slap every one on the head, then go PNG!
April 25th, 2004 at 1:13 am
“M$ does the right thing”?
That would be nice, but… when was the last time that happened? When they threw away the 3.1 / 95 / 98 kernel and switched to NT/XP for all their OS’s? That was around 4 years ago…
It would be nice though. It just wouldn’t do M$ any good, seeing as they aren’t getting sued right now. Speaking of which, is there any sort of law against buying out a company that tries to sue you?
-Anonymous
April 25th, 2004 at 2:18 am
stupid stuff is a waste of time, and a location that will put an obnoxioux tool bar on you browser if you let it.
How Stupid does this one think we are? No more stupid stuff for me.
April 25th, 2004 at 3:08 am
JPEG isn’t a IETF Standard it is an ISO standard. Check the readme for libjpeg if you don’t believe me.
April 25th, 2004 at 3:46 am
I read somewhere that Microsoft was still deliberating the licensing with them, so I guess that’s why they weren’t sued.. yet.
April 25th, 2004 at 11:49 am
this is no different than another image compression algorithym. tiff or giff? I cant recall but there was a big todo over it being used “illegally”
Fact remains though if they own the patent to it and companies aren’t coughing up the dough to use the algorithym then they have a right to sue … no different than mp3 format … royalties are supposed to be payed for the use of it.
April 25th, 2004 at 1:34 pm
Interesting that missing from this list is Micro$oft.
April 25th, 2004 at 2:14 pm
It’s a pity that everyone seems to be suing everyone else with regards to patents.
Multimedia formats (I am also thinking audio and video formats) take a lot of people a long time to come up with. Much thought has to go into things like acceptable lossiness, speed of encoding and decoding (especially for portable devices), and file size / quality trade offs. We need to recognise that it is important for companies to be reimbursed financially for this work if we are to see major progress.
But you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can’t put your technology up to be used as a standard without making it blindingly obvious that you intend on charging a license fee for it. The fact is software everywhere uses JPEG images internally. It has been public knowledge about the gif patent issues for a long time, and a lot of development environments dont actually natively support gif images for that reason.
If Jpeg made it clear that their format was not free to use, then no digital camera manufacturer would use the standard, few photo editing programs would bother with it, and we would all use PNG or something like that. Lets just hope the patent office come to their senses and recognise the extortion for what it is. Other patent owners that intend on charging for their formats should be forced to publicise their intention to do so, or lose out on the ability.
April 25th, 2004 at 6:29 pm
Yes, Very true. The developers must be given their dues big big names !!! Ghani [Karachi-Pakistan]
April 26th, 2004 at 11:28 am
don’t they display jpeg as well?
April 26th, 2004 at 8:10 pm
We should all just forget using JPEG or GIF and go for PNG all the way! It’s lossless unlike JPEG and sometimes beats it on compression of photos, and it looks great going all the way up to 24-bit unlike GIF. It even supports transparency which is great for gamers, programmers and artists!
April 27th, 2004 at 11:38 pm
No, THIS is stupid.
http://na3k.net
Well, not really.