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[FYI] JPEG guardians vow to defend free images



http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26296.html

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JPEG guardians vow to defend free images  

By Andrew Orlowski in London  

Posted: 20/07/2002 at 01:15 GMT  

[...]

But the JPEG ('Joint Photographic Experts Group') committee which 
oversees the standard is confident that it can fend off Forgent's 
speculative IP grab. And just in case it's going to launch a website 
which gathers examples of prior art. Prior art can demolish the 
cockiest patent claims. You can read this call to arms here.   

And a new forum has arisen, to aggregate news stories and discussion 
on this important topic, at Burn All JPEGs, thanks to Al Pope.   

For the record, Forgent Networks still hasn't returned our call. The 
one that started this hullabaloo. ®   

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See

http://burnalljpegs.org/

and also

http://www.jpeg.org/newsrel1.htm

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Concerning recent patent claims

Considerable interest has been expressed in the views of the JPEG 
committee concerning claims made by Forgent Networks Inc on their web 
site that intellectual property that they have obtained through their 
acquisition of Compression Labs Inc. They refer specifically to US 
Patent 4,698,672, which refers amongst other claims to technology 
which might be applied in run length coding, found in many 
technologies including the implementations of a baseline version of 
ISO/IEC 10918-1, commonly referred to as JPEG.  

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. The 
committee have also become aware that other organisations including 
Philips, and Lucent may also be claiming some elements of 
intellectual property that might be applied to the original JPEG and 
JBIG (IS 11544 standards). As a response to this, the JPEG committee 
will be collecting, through its new web site (to be launched shortly) 
a substantial repository of prior art and it invites submissions, 
particularly where the content may be applied to claims of 
intellectual property. A note will be placed on the web site shortly 
explaining the process for such submissions.  

This effort will take some time to organise, but the JPEG committee 
hope to have it in place prior to their next meeting in Shanghai in 
October 2002.  

It has always been a strong goal of the JPEG committee that its 
standards should be implementable in their baseline form without 
payment of royalty and license fees, and the committee would like to 
record their disappointment that some organisations appear to be 
working in conflict with this goal. Considerable time has been spent 
in committee in attempting to either arrange licensing on these 
terms, or in avoiding existing intellectual property, and many 
hundreds of organisations and academic communities have supported us 
in our work.  

The up and coming JPEG 2000 standard has been prepared along these 
lines, and agreement reached with over 20 large organisations holding 
many patents in this area to allow use of their intellectual property 
in connection with the standard without payment of license fees or 
royalties.  

Richard Clark JPEG Webmaster and editor Committee member since JPEG's 
formation (and before…).  

Reviewed and approved at the 27th WG1 Boston Meeting, July 19 2002  

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