RSSUSPTO to Reconsider JPEG Patent
by Ed Oswald
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office agreed earlier this week to a request by the Public Patent Foundation to review a controversial patent that Forgent Networks has been attempting to enforce through lawsuits with dozens of companies, including Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, RIM and Google.
Forgent acquired the rights to the JPEG compression patent through a 1997 purchase of Compression Labs, however it did not start asserting its ownership and demanding licensing for the patent until a year ago.
Approximately 40 companies are now in litigation with Forgent, according to the company. It says the compression technologies covered in the patent are included within the JPEG technology, and anyone who uses the format must pay royalties back to the company.
More than $105 million in revenue from licensing fees for the patent have been paid to Forgent from over fifty companies on three continents, the company said.
"This is the first step towards ending the harm being caused to the public by Forgent Networks' aggressive assertion of the patent, which would never have been issued by the Patent Office if they had known of the prior art that we submitted as part of our reexamination request," PUBPAT's Executive Director Dan Ravicher said.
Prior art claims have become the best defense for companies accused of patent infringement. These claims aim to show that either part or all of a patent is not an original invention, thus having it invalidated.
Such a defense has worked so far for RIM, which announced Wednesday that all of NTP's patents had been invalidated due to prior art claims.
PUBPAT said that 70 percent of third-party requests for patent reexamination result in either a change or revocation of that patent.
14 Comments
This patent crap needs to be changed. I can see an original owner reaping profits on his/hers work for 10-15 yrs., but once it is sold, it should become public property. That would solve a lot of problems, and would put a lot of attorneys out of business.
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Maybe the rules reguarding patent expiration should be changed... If a company patents something then asserts right away (or whith in some relatively short timeframe) then they can sue whomever they want... but if they patent something and do nothing with it for 10 years or so then they can't sue a company that has an infringing product (or maybe only if they're product was under development at the time the patent was issued). Or if a company CLEARLY fails to inforce their rights when they know people are using their product for say 5 years they lose their right to sue later. It gives an unfair advantage to the patent holder; in essence someone else is paying to maket their product.
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I had thought that unlike GIF, the JPEG format was designed to be patent free. Is that not the case?
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Actually, JPEG is _like_ GIF in the sense that NEITHER format was intentionally designed to use patented technology. In both cases, it took years before someone stepped forward to claim infringement.
In the specific case of GIF, CompuServe designed it in 1987 and incorporated the LZW algorithm which had been published in the June 1984 issue of IEEE Computer magazine. I still have my copy. It wasn't until 1993 that Unisys contacted CompuServe to inform them that Unisys held patent rights to LZW.
People often assume that patent infringement occurs intentionally (especially if a big "evil" company like Microsoft is being accused). In reality, most patent infringement occurs accidentally. In the technology industry, at any given time there are thousands of people thinking about the latest trends and how to implement various approaches for solving current problems. Inevitably, people sometimes come up with ideas at the same time which are fairly similar. It then becomes a matter for lawyers to determine whether they are similar enough to constitute infringement. Since lawyers on both sides (plaintiff and defendent) make the most money when infringement occurs, it shouldn't be surprising that infringement seems to happen quite a bit.
I have nothing against companies who want to profit from proprietary technology, but they ought to treat it like proprietary technology. Openly publishing the complete details of LZW while also applying for patent is contradictory behavior to me. In the mid-80's, computer magazines were all about people sharing information so that other people could build on top of it. There was little reason for CompuServe to expect a patent issue to surface years later.
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If the patent is not invalidated due to prior art or some other issue (I believe one of the arguements against SCO in their fight with IBM was that they had licensed rights to others that let them give their code derivation away) then they should get compensation. That being said, I think they ought to be reasonable and charge for commercial use and let GPL, academic, licensed software use it for free.
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And if that doesn't work we can all swith to .PNG
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PNG isn't lossless. Big file size differences. In fact, huge.
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internet speeds increase and hdd's are cheaper ;o so even if we have to change to png who cares? lol
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yeah but, you mean PNG is lossless... isn't it?
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yes, you're right, PNG is lossless :-)
Sounds like that's what they meant though, as a result of larger filesizes.
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my digital camera cares, as well as my camera equiped mobile phone ;)
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Although it's not the same thing, I thought I'd point out there is compression:
http://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Compression.html
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You might care when every page you visit takes either takes three times longer to load than normal or looks completey bare, and when you dvd player and portable media player can't display your photos any more, and when all of your photo packages can't create photos for the web any more.
You might also care when there is a new race to establish a lossy compression for photo-type material on the Internet and elsewhere and half a dozen new file formats spring up and different browsers support different formats.
Did it take you longer to think about the issue or post your one line reply?
P.S. "lol"
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Digit... your response is awesome.
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