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JPEG guardians vow to defend free images

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


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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