[Richard Kimball]

This is interesting. 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? From reading the release and other data in the post, I got the feeling this was a pretty low-rent company. Other than their income from the patent, they made 7 mil in revenues for the quarter, and their press release made it sound like a threat (give us money now or the price goes up). I can certainly see a bunch of corporate suits getting scared and paying up.

[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.

[Djarum]

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

[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.