JPEG patent claims

Hello matt,

I saw your April 22, 2004 article
 JPEG Hits New Patent-Infringement Snag
 http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1572331,00.asp
I found your article to be informative and balanced.

This patent claim is not new, as you noted, it first surfaced around
2002. Forgent issued a press release about it in July 2002.
http://www.forgent.com/company/press_room/AAS_07-08-02.pdf

The claim that the patent is infringed by JPEG was disputed by well
respected JPEG technology expert Tom Lane, of the Independent JPEG
Group, in July 2002
http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/07/19/020719hnforgent.xml
"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."

Håkon Lie, CTO of Opera Software, also commented in that article
"I would encourage people not to pay up if they are asked to. We have
done a technical evaluation of this patent and we don't believe it
applies. What it tries to do is patent Huffman coding in combination
with runlength coding and we believe there's plenty of prior art for
that before 1986,"

The ISO JPEG committee, as you note, has also been collecting prior
art relative to the claim. On this page
http://www.jpeg.org/newsrel1.html they stated "The committee has
examined these claims briefly, and at present believes that prior art
exists in areas in which the patent might claim application to ISO/IEC
10918-1 in its baseline form."




-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group

Received on Friday, 23 April 2004 17:07:31 UTC