JPEG guardians vow to defend free images

Yesterday, we broke the story that an obscure Texan video conferencing company is seeking royalties from a patent it acquired five years ago. With the help of a gold-bricking law firm, it wants to collect back royalties from every client device manufacturer which might possibly ever be in receipt of a transmitted JPEG image, and this includes digital cameras, PDAs, phones, scanners and of course, web browsers.

As we disclosed, Sony has already paid $15 million for the right to use Forgent's patent. Perhaps "broke the story " isn't the right phrase - it was sitting around for a week before we noticed, and since we published the story, there's been a right righteous hullabaloo at Slashdot (which in an Intellectual Property landgrab of its own, claimed the scoop for itself after reading The Register - doh!) and at other fine sites. And that in itself is worrying - the free software community's early warning system is as poky as the CIA's Arabic intelligence department. That's a cause for concern in itself.

But the JPEG ('Joint Photographic Experts Group') committee which oversees the standard is confident that it can fend off Forgent's speculative IP grab. And just in case it's going to launch a website which gathers examples of prior art. Prior art can demolish the cockiest patent claims. You can read this call to arms here.

And a new forum has arisen, to aggregate news stories and discussion on this important topic, at Burn All JPEGs, thanks to Al Pope.

For the record, Forgent Networks still hasn't returned our call. The one that started this hullabaloo. ®

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JPEGs are not free: Patent holder pursues IP grab

Sometimes I find myself longing for the days when those who deserved it could be run out on a rail. This seems like such a case.

JPEGs have been in use for many many years. I first encountered them back in the days when I had my 386 with a VGA whose top resolution in 256-color mode was 640x400 (yes, 400) and even that was S-L-O-W. I don't remember exactly when I got my 486 and VLB card, but it was probably 1992 or 1993. For someone to attempt a retroactive patent claim nearly (if not more than) a decade later is a gross abuse of the patent system.

I wish there were some way to give such people what they really deserve.

While I have no problem with patents and intellectual property, I DO have to take issue with what they are doing in this case - it smacks of dishonesty. When something is in the public domain (which, technically, JPEG has been, in practice for several years), and a company has a patent on it, it seems that they merely waited until everyone was using it before they began enforcement. It's dishonest, and what I consider to be fraudulent... but maybe it's just me... I hope they get smacked down...

Here's a concept expressed by another, whom I happen to agree with, at least on this issue...

"Actually, there is precedent for overturning the patent. If I let you walk accross my back yard and do not stop you, you assume from my behavior that it is ok with me. Assume that I have let you walk accross my back yard for the past 15 years and there is a well worn path now. Hundreds of people use that path every day and finally I get tired of being a nice guy. Too bad, I have let the situation go to long and there is an easement under the law there. It is called a trodden path and is the same as a sidewalk.

If I don't want you walking in my back yard, I have to stop you within a reasonable amount of time and cannot wait until the path becomes a well worn and commonly accepted walkway.

It seems like the same principle will kill this patent. They did not act within a reasonable time to mitigate the damages done to other companies who used the patent."

Not to mention that IBM appears to have patented the same thing a few weeks earlier, but the idiots at the patent office had no clue that they granted a second patent on the same thing - which, oddly enough, shows the problems with patenting software algorithms, but that's a discussion for another day :0)

The fundamental rule of the patent system is this: You can patent anything you can get away with patenting. I have worked in companies where intellectual property is a big issue and the patent lawyers occasionally give us engineers talks on basic patent law. Usually these talks consist of horror stories about cases where prior art has been successfully patented. The most outrageous I have seen was a patent on the concept of "testing". And a co-worker once got a patent on something that (as I tried to point out to him) was a watered-down version of a classic paper that appeared (I think) in an ACM journal.

This is especially a problem in the software area because of lack of expertise on the part of the examiners in the patent office.

Could be... however, I do know that Compression Labs (the company that originally patented a portion of the JPEG work) was part of JPEG early on, and gave the JPEG group the rights to use the patented technology without restriction or royalties... then nearly a decade later they are bought. The new company (Forgent) carries on the status quo for a few years, until they begin running out of money... They decide they have a cash-cow available after their patent lawyers decide they do have patent on a portion of JPEG (I still think FOrgent's patent has to do with multi-frame images, not JPEG, but I'm not one of Forgent's lawyers,so what do I know?), and this is what happens... I think Prior Art can be shown in this case, and it will get tossed out if it goes to court.

Meanwhile, JPEG 2000 is underway (which does not use the Forgent patent), and Forgent will wind up as well-loved as Unisys. I wouldn't be surprised to see the market take care of Forgent. This is one case where they had enough rope to shoot themselves in the foot, and they did... :0)

Ouch...

When I bought my house, there was a "well-worn" path that ran through my yard... I couldn't block it off legally because the prior owners didn't enforce yada yada yada. However, the law never said I had to maintain it, like the foolish prior owner did, and I just let the blackberry bushes get out of control... now, 6 years later, there is no path, and now there's no one in my yard :0)

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