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The JPEG patent
Just in case anyone needed further proof of the dangers of software patents,
along comes Forgent
trying to wring money out of users of the JPEG standard long after it has
become entrenched. After two years of trying to wheedle licensing fees for
JPEG, the company announced last week that it was suing 31 companies,
including IBM, Apple, Xerox, Panasonic and Macromedia to name just a few,
for infringement of U.S. Patent 4,698,672, entitled "Coding System for
Reducing Redundancy."
The company has been trying to monetize the '672 patent since 2002, and has managed to extract licensing fees from more than 30 companies, including Sony, to the tune of $90 million for use of the JPEG format. Forgent isn't exactly modest in its claims. In its press release, Forgent claims to have:
...the sole and exclusive right to use and license all the claims under the
'672 patent that implement JPEG in all "fields of use" except in the
satellite broadcast business. Forgent's "fields of use" for licensing
opportunities include digital cameras, digital still image devices,
personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellular telephones that download
images, browsers, digital camcorders with a still image function, scanners
and other devices used to compress, store, manipulate, print or transmit
digital images.
While Forgent presses on with its claims, others have expressed doubt as to whether the patent claims would stand up. The JPEG committee has issued statement saying that the committee "believes that prior art exists in areas in which the patent might claim application to ISO/IEC 10918-1 [the JPEG standard] in its baseline form." The statement was issued back in 2002, when Forgent initially began asserting patent claims. There seems to be some confusion over the actual expiration date of Forgent's patent as well. According to Forgent, the patent expires in October 2006. Others are saying that the patent is set to expire this October, seventeen years from the date the patent was granted. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) website seems to support Forgent's position. According to the USPTO FAQ, patents granted prior to June 8, 1995 "automatically have a term that is the greater of the twenty year term discussed above [from the application date] or seventeen years from the patent grant." The patent application was submitted October 27, 1986 and granted October 6, 1987 which gives Forgent a little more than two years to harass software companies making use of JPEG. The Independent JPEG Group (IJG), responsible for widely-used JPEG library (libjpeg), makes no mention of the Forgent claims on its website. In fact, the IJG makes little mention of anything on its website, including valid contact information. The README that comes with the JPEG library says that the software avoids the arithmetic coding of the JPEG specification due to patents owned by IBM, AT&T and Mitsubishi. No mention is made of the '672 patent. However, IJG organizer Tom Lane was quoted two years ago as saying that Forgent's patent does not apply:
The patent describes an encoding method that is clearly not like what JPEG
does. The patent describes a three-way symbol classification; the closest
analog in JPEG is a two-way classification. If the jury can count higher
than two, the case will fail.
At the moment, open source developers do not seem to be in a rush to remove JPEG capability from their projects, but are instead taking a "wait-and-see" attitude. The topic has come up on Debian-legal, the Gimp-developer mailing list and other project lists. So far, no project has come out to say that they would be pulling JPEG support, much to this writer's relief. A quick count shows that more than 150 packages installed on my system depend on libjpeg. Even if Forgent's claims amount to nothing more than a nuisance for a handful of proprietary software companies, they still highlight a problem for open source software. Companies will continue to press software patent claims so long as the legal system permits, and there's money to be made. It's only a matter of time before one of the suits has a serious impact on open source. (Log in to post comments)
The JPEG patent Posted Apr 29, 2004 3:52 UTC (Thu) by noise (guest, #2923) [Link] "It's only a matter of time before one of the suits has a serious impact on open source."Oh but that time came years ago with the whole Unisys GIF/LZW fiasco. Look how many packages
The JPEG patent Posted Apr 29, 2004 13:52 UTC (Thu) by jmshh (guest, #8257) [Link] While I'm seeing all the other issues like you, there is one historic difference: a lot of projects threw out GIF, even when they didn't have to. The patent in this case applies to compression only, so decompression was never a problem. Of cause, Unisys was not interested in making that difference too obvious...
The JPEG patent Posted Apr 29, 2004 12:34 UTC (Thu) by icculus_98 (guest, #8535) [Link] It poses a particularly interesting scenario, I think, because the JPEGcompression routine is nothing more than a glorified discrete cosine transform. In my mind, this would be like someone patenting the concept of "frequency modulation", then going around and telling your FM radio stations to fork over a few million dollars for IP infringements.
The JPEG patent Posted Apr 29, 2004 13:47 UTC (Thu) by jmshh (guest, #8257) [Link] As I understand patents, you wouldn't be able to patent "frequency modulation", even 100 years ago, but the use of FM for some specific result, like less noise. Example from chemistry: mixing of several chemicals is well known, but the specific recipe for creating some new stuff can be patented. So here DCT is well known, but it's application to picture compression may be new.
The JPEG patent Posted Apr 29, 2004 13:53 UTC (Thu) by icculus_98 (guest, #8535) [Link] Right, you're saying that you can't patent a mathematical routine, butyou can patent the application of that routine to some specific function. But what is a "picture" other than a sequence of bits? Same with a radio signal, save for the analog <-> digital part. So someone could have patented "Frequency Modulation of Microphone Acquired Signals", right?
The JPEG patent vs FM patent Posted May 1, 2004 0:07 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I don't follow. I agree that a patent for Frequency Modulation of Microphone Acquired Signals is analogous to a patent on DCT for picture compression (i.e. JPEG), but what argument does that make? Such an FM patent is not ridiculous in any way (assuming you mean it was issued before FM radio was public knowledge, as the JPEG patent was allegedly issued before DCT compression of pictures was public knowledge).
The JPEG patent Posted May 1, 2004 17:25 UTC (Sat) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] And now you reach the fundamental fiction of intellectual property law today: Despite the fact that everything on a computer is only a stream of bits (some of which describe how to transform other streams of bit), we treat some of these bit streams differently than others. In some cases, the same bit stream gets treated differently whether you call it a "picture" or a "sound" or an "executable." "So the legal system we have - blessed as we are by its consequences if we are copyright teachers, Congressmen, Gucci-gulchers or Big Rupert himself - is compelled to treat indistinguishable things in unlike ways." -- Eben Moglen
The JPEG patent Posted Apr 29, 2004 14:20 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] Crap! Is PNG safe or are they next?
The JPEG patent Posted Apr 29, 2004 19:46 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Nothing is safe. There is probably some little patent with a title/effect to cover all image/sound compression not covered by other patents.
The JPEG patent Posted Apr 29, 2004 20:50 UTC (Thu) by lilo (guest, #661) [Link] It's only a matter of time before one of the suits has a serious impact on open source. It's also only a matter of time before the FOSS user community is large enough to have a serious impact on the continuing evolution of intellectual property law. The sooner we reach that point, the better for everybody. The FOSS community needs to keep growing. And we all need to make sure that new users fully understand the practical implications of the freedoms they receive.
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