JPEGs are not free: Patent holder pursues IP grab

A video conferencing company based in Austin, Texas says it's going to pursue royalties on the transmission of JPEG images.

And it's already found a licensee: Sony Corporation.

Formerly known as VTEL, Forgent Networks acquired Compression Labs in 1997, acquiring this patent into the bargain. The patent claim was filed in 1986 but Compression Labs never pursued royalties.

Forgent last week declared that it has "the sole and exclusive right to use and license all the claims" under the patent and is seeking a deal wherever JPEGs are transmitted, with the exception of satellite broadcasting.

It specifies browsers, PDAs, digital cameras, phones and scanners in its 'clarification'. So the IP claim extends to any client device which receives a JPEG image.

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.

In its the filing, Forgent adds:

"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."

Forgent had yet to respond to our enquiries at time of writing. ®

BTW..I find something funny here..I remember JPEG standing for Joint Partners Encryption Group, it seems now the name has changed to Joint Photographic Experts Group. Am I missing something here? Also, I recall this type of thread about 6 weeks ago, someone had mentioned the many, many encoding types under JPEG; could it be that this company is going after a particular encryption extension of JPEG?

Once the Genie is out of the bottle, it is oh-so-difficult to get it back in. Another image format would be invented as a get-around before you know it and their patent would be useless.

Can you imagine if, say, the inventors of the VHS videocassette demanded that everyone who uses the format pay them royalties? Good luck.

Wait a minute - why should you be paying THEM????? I took that durn picture - if you're gonna pay anyone it durn better be me.

. oops wrong thread-sorry

Ok... everyone on internet will have to email back ALL of their jpeg's. All at once. At the same time. Lets say August 1, 2002. 8:00 am eastern time. They should be able to their email servers unclogged by ohhhhhh... Christmas.

I wonder it they will also try to collect on "thermally enhanced air."

It won't happen. If they try to charge for the use of JPEGs, everyone will stop using JPEGs just like everyone dropped GIFs when Apple (?) started charging licensing fees. A new "free" image format will be used.

It wasn't Apple. It was CompuServe that invented the GIF format.

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