- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 23:05:57 +0200
- To: matt_hicks@ziffdavis.com
- Cc: "www-archive@w3.org"@w3.org
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