RSSPUBPAT Fights Against JPEG Patent
By Ed Oswald | Published November 17, 2005, 3:02 PM
The Public Patent Foundation has set its sights on a compression patent owned by Forgent Networks, saying it has proof of prior art that would invalidate the company's rights to the technology. The group has asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to revoke the patent.
Forgent acquired the rights to the data compression patent through a 1997 purchase of Compression Labs. It did not start enforcing the patent until about a year ago. At that time, it filed several lawsuits against various companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, RIM and Google.
RIM has settled with Forgent, however Sun and Google have countersued the company accusing CLI of defrauding the U.S. Patent Office about a lack of prior art.
"CLI is using the '672 patent to harass anyone that implements the Joint Photographic Experts Group ('JPEG') format," PUBPAT said it its filing. "CLI's aggressive assertion of the '672 patent is causing substantial public harm by threatening this international standard on which the public relies."
If Forgent is successful in its suits, it could threaten a widely-used standardized graphics format that is implemented in today's electronics and technologies, including publishing, graphics and digital photography.
"Forgent Networks is a classic example of the new and rapidly growing trend of patent holders that do nothing more than sue people who make products or services available to the public," PUBPAT Executive Director Dan Ravicher said in a statement.
"Unfortunately, the patent system allows for such perverse behavior because it cares more about patent holders than it does the public," Ravicher argued.
A decision on the matter from the patent office is not expected for at least one year. However, a court case could drag on for years afterwards, analysts say.
I think utlimately the open source community will have to make something for photo compression and I agree PNG is not it.
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|Does this remind anyone of the GIF trojan horse?
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|Tiff is an open standard. I'll be the first one to agree that the compression isn't on par with JPGs. This seems like a great opportunity for a photo editing application to gain market dominance by making their proprietary format royalty free. Also PNG is markedly better than GIF though, because it's 32-bit, though only 24 of those bits are applicable to unrevised digital camera photos.
Cheers,
Christian
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|use png... game over.
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|Tell that to my digital camera!!!
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|PNG is hardly suited to photo quality graphics since it is lossless, like GIF.
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|As soon as compact flash comes in a 500GB version for $39, I'll gladley switch...
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|Can you elaborate?
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|from what i've seen, PNG is lossless and will give a larger file size then JPG which is lossy but will give a much smaller file size for photos and such. For some art things i made, i saved in PNG just cause i wanted lossless but JPG would have given much smaller output file size. The way i see it, with an audio analogy, PNG would be like FLAC, and JPG would be more like MP3... (comparing BMP to WAV) i think something like that :) For lossless PNG seems pretty good though.
Just for kicks, i took one pic i had and saved it in 3 formats, file output sizes will vary but this one came to:
BMP = 595kb
PNG = 195kb
JPG = 18kb
Yes i think JPG still rules for the network.
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|That doesn't even make sense. Are you sure you understand what lossless means?
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|For some images, png can be smaller by 2 times.
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|that's true, but i think that would apply to an image with few colors
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|If everyone used and prefered png, i guaruntee your camera would have supported png. Fact is the file sizes compared to jpg are much larger. People prefer a lossy format if means that images will still look good and be much smaller.
EDIT: If people have to start paying high prices for jpg, i'm sure things will change.
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