Forgent to get rich from JPEG

http://www.dpreview.com ^ | July 18, 2002

[Richard Kimball]

Forgent Networks (formally known as VTEL) has posted a press release stating their claim to JPEG and their intention to pursue licensing revenue from companies who use it. They own United States patent 4,698,672 which covers the JPEG compression standard, this patent was created by Compression Labs who Forgent bought back in 1997. The press release specifically mentions digital cameras as well as PDA's, web browsers, phones and scanners. It looks as though Sony has already paid $15 million for the privilege...

From The Register:

"Forgent's most recent SEC filing states that Sony Corporation paid the company $15 million for licensing Patent 4,698,672: a significant portion of the $22 million Forgent booked as revenue in the quarter."

From Forgent's own SEC Filing:

In May 2002, Forgent signed a multi-million dollar patent license agreement with Sony Corporation, a leading manufacturer of audio, video, communications and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. The patent agreement relates to the Company's data compression technology and marks the second such agreement that Forgent has obtained. The first agreement, with another prestigious international company, was signed in April 2002 and generated $15.0 million in revenue during the three months ended April 30, 2002 for the Company. The Company is pursuing additional license agreements with other companies from multiple industries; however, there can be no assurance that additional licenses can be obtained or, if obtained will be on similar favorable terms.

Press Release:

Forgent Networks Clarifies Licensing Arrangement AUSTIN, Texas, Jul 11, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Forgent(tm) Networks Inc. (Nasdaq:FORG) today clarified its licensing program regarding Forgent's JPEG data compression technology, owned by its subsidiary Compression Labs Inc., embodied in U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672.

JPEG is a standardized image compression mechanism and is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale still images.

Forgent has the sole and exclusive right to use and license all the claims under the '672 patent that implement JPEG in all "fields of use" except in the satellite broadcast business. Forgent's "fields of use" for licensing opportunities include digital cameras, digital still image devices, personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular telephones that download images, browsers, digital camcorders with a still image function, scanners and other devices used to compress, store, manipulate, print or transmit digital images.

Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent's IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue.

"We wanted to ensure the investment community and the general public are clear about the terms of our valuable JPEG data compression technology, one of the many technologies we have in our patent portfolio," stated Richard Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer at Forgent. "We are in ongoing discussions with other manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners and other products that use JPEG technology for licensing opportunities."

[Old Airplane Driver]

That was a file that had been previously severely compressed with JPG and contained a number of artifacts. It was mainly posted just to demonstrate the capability of current browsers, not to demonstrate the compression capability of PNG. It is possible to do much better from a compression standpoint. I appreciate your concern with image size, as I maintain a couple of websites myself. I keep hoping that JPEG2000 will get more attention, as it potentially has greater compression capability than JPG and produces much higher-quality images. The neat thing about PNG is that it supports both 48 bit color and transparency. If you need transparency now, you are stuck with GIF and a 256 color palette.

In any case, the patents will soon run out and we will be free to use whatever compression technique and file format we wish.

[Old Airplane Driver]

Sony didn't ante up $15 million because they were cowed by legal threats, so one has to believe that the Forgent extortion has some legal merit.

[Richard Kimball]

Actually, there are several copy written file formats. .FLT (Open Flight - a Real Time 3D Polygon format used in Game/Simulations) being one of them

Yeah, I phrased myself poorly. Most of the proprietary file formats, though, are for use in somewhat specialized fields, such as game creation, etc. Jpeg is so common, it seems kind of like trying to copyright the letter A. (Darn, shouldn't have mentioned that. I'm sure someone will try!) BTW, I wasn't aware of the GIF issues others mentioned. GIF really isn't capable of doing even web based continuous tone images. Even with an optimized pallet, the color gamut is still pretty weak and the file size is monstrous to get a decent image up.

[Richard Kimball]

Sony didn't ante up $15 million because they were cowed by legal threats

Good point. Sony has impressed me as being a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them (except, weren't they the ones that came up with the magic marker copy protection scheme?)

[Don Joe]

"Even when you buy image processing libraries for use in software development, GIF output is disabled until you get a license key from Unisys."

I don't think that's universal. I've seen something in the licensing for my copy of Visual Studio 6 that was quite convoluted, but what it boiled down to as best as I can recollect at the moment is that while Microsoft indeed paid a license fee so that they could legally include .GIF functionality in the product, developers who use the product would need to negotiate any necessary agreements with Unisys on their own if they wished to use any .GIF functionalty.

But, I don't believe that anything was disabled pending any third party agreements.

I don't doubt that smaller companies might not be willing to risk offending Unisys by selling working versions of their software, but as far as MS, that doesn't seem to be a factor.

That said, I never bothered looking into any of it, because I don't have any need for .GIF files. In fact, I despise them almost as much as I despise those accursed Flash ads that work overtime to annoy and distract. At least an animated GIF eye-poker can be stopped in its tracks by hitting the Esc key or the Stop button. Those &$*#& Flash ads have to be either scrolled offscreen, or covered with another window -- if you want to be able to read the content on the page without flashing lights aimed in your face.

[Don Joe]

"If you need transparency now, you are stuck with GIF and a 256 color palette."

Why not use .BMP?

[krb]

GIF is lossless compression, though 256 indexed colors. PNG is lossless compression with no limit of the # of colors.

[Quicksilver]

BMP files are large and have no compression.

[Djarum]

Forgent wants to see who will blink. There is a wealth of info on the slashdot thread.

[Don Joe]

"BMP files are large and have no compression."

Support for RLE compression was added in Windows 3.0.

[altair]

If I understand you properly, you're saying that they're running a scam and just trying to convince everyone they own the compression technology?

I think it's a scam. I quote the following from my libjpeg source code:

It appears that the arithmetic coding option of the JPEG spec is covered by patents owned by IBM, AT&T, and Mitsubishi. Hence arithmetic coding cannot legally be used without obtaining one or more licenses. For this reason, support for arithmetic coding has been removed from the free JPEG software. (Since arithmetic coding provides only a marginal gain over the unpatented Huffman mode, it is unlikely that very many implementations will support it.) So far as we are aware, there are no patent restrictions on the remaining code.

Smoke and mirrors.

[Quicksilver]

Compression used in Windows DIB can be RLE4 or RLE8. RLE8 is run-length encoding used for a 256 colors bitmap (8 bits-per-pixel) and RLE4 is run-length encoding used for a 16 colors bitmap (4 bits-per-pixel). Formats are using two modes: Encode and absolute. Both can occur anywhere in the bitmap.

Oops, I had forgotten about the RLE compression support in BMP, though it's limited to 256 colors. I guess it might work as an alternative to GIF.

[Abcdefg]

It's the "if you need transparency" part of the statement.

[Don Joe]

It can be done, which is why I suggested them in the first place. If you don't believe me, look at any Windows desktop and examine the icons. Note how they are not all square blocks. Or, look at the mouse cursor on a Windows machine. (These items are bitmaps, not GIFs.)

I'll admit that this is not my baliwicke, however I do recall having farted around with it several years ago in VB (probably Ver 4 or thereabouts). I remember assigning a certain color value that the system recognized as transparent when the images were displayed.

On top of all that, newer versions of Windows (I think it started with one of the '98 releases, but I never really used '98 so I'm not sure) support complete transparency operations (of 0 to 100%) for everything. (I've played with making application windows "fade away" to nothing as they evaporate over the rest of the desktop.)