All your jpegs belong to us.

July 18, 2002 1:30 PM

All your jpegs belong to us. Another asshat clown patent claim on well known prior art.

Forgent's "fields of use" for licensing opportunities include digital cameras, digital still image devices, personal digital assistants (PDA's), 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.

posted by scottst (36 comments total)

what's an "asshat"?
posted by ColdChef at 1:37 PM on July 18, 2002

What the hell are they trying to do, say that anything compressed into JPEG belongs to them? Or that the ability to compress something into JPEG belongs to them, and relevant software/hardware makers need to start ponying up licensing fees?

Either way, that's madness, sheer madness.

Asshat madness, even.
posted by insomnyuk at 1:52 PM on July 18, 2002

I think "asshat" is a Fark-ism.
posted by Cyrano at 1:53 PM on July 18, 2002

It was either I used 'Asshat Clown' or the random string of characters generated by the repeated banging of my head into my keyboard after reading the press release.

I went with brevity.
posted by scottst at 1:56 PM on July 18, 2002

Here we prefer the expression "no-talent-ass-clown", thank you.
posted by briank at 1:57 PM on July 18, 2002

on /. someone pointed out that the defence of laches applies - you can't do much about enforcing a patent like this if it's more than six years since you took out the patent and you've done nothing to enforce it.
posted by andrew cooke at 1:57 PM on July 18, 2002

It was either I used 'Asshat Clown' or the random string of characters generated by the repeated banging of my head into my keyboard after reading the press release.

I went with brevity.

Heh. Excellent. Well, you will notice that the press release came from Austin, TX. There's a high probability the person was high when they wrote it.
posted by ColdChef at 1:59 PM on July 18, 2002

insomnyuk, makers of software that creates GIFs do have to pay licensing fees to Unisys because they own the rights to the LZW algorythm they use for compression (which is why there is a site called burnallgifs.org).
Still, I'm very surprised by this - JPEG stands for "Joint Photographic Experts Group", it seems unlikely a company could be holding a patent on the format. Also, there seems to be next to no talk about this on the web.
posted by c3o at 2:04 PM on July 18, 2002

"Asshat clown" discussion is more fun than another boring patent claim that obviously won't last 11 seconds. I look to work "asshat clown" into my very next conversation.
posted by McBain at 2:04 PM on July 18, 2002

They say this is a "clarification" of their licensing program. What all were they claiming before? That "on/off" bit concept? Asshat clowns.
posted by yhbc at 2:07 PM on July 18, 2002

Well Sony have already coughed up $15mil so there must be something to it no ?
posted by zeoslap at 2:10 PM on July 18, 2002

McBain: Oh, okay, then let me get back on topic by posting this definition or this page, which is as pointless as the patent.
posted by c3o at 2:13 PM on July 18, 2002

I am coming to find the idea of copyrights more and more disagreeable, because of things like this.
posted by insomnyuk at 2:15 PM on July 18, 2002

andrew cooke - Laches only keep them from collecting accrued damages. Says nothing about collecting damages from now on.
posted by Nauip at 2:17 PM on July 18, 2002

briank - Office Space rules.
posted by swank6 at 2:22 PM on July 18, 2002

Forgent? Didn't they release "Slow Ride" in 1978?
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 2:28 PM on July 18, 2002

coldchef: Hey, I'm just outside of Austin, dammit. I resemble that remark! :P

Seriously, where'd we get a reputation for all being high? Was it that Matthew McCaunaghey-smoking-marijuana-then-playing-bongos-naked-in-his-house-and-getting-arrested thing?

As a plus, Russell Crowe likes Austin. Which is good for me, since that means every time he comes to town I get another opportunity to try to kidnap him and make him my secret love slave...
posted by beth at 2:30 PM on July 18, 2002

c3o: didn't unisys give up on that?

beth: I'd be more worried about getting beat up by him.
posted by ODiV at 2:36 PM on July 18, 2002

Seriously, where'd we get a reputation for all being high? Was it that Matthew McCaunaghey-smoking-marijuana-then-playing-bongos-naked-in-his-house-and-getting-arrested thing?

Sure. Either that or the fact that marijuana is smoked openly at just about every concert or festival in Austin. (I just moved from Austin and have actual second hand knowledge of the "incident" you mention above. FAR more interesting things were going on that evening than mere naked bongos.
posted by ColdChef at 2:39 PM on July 18, 2002

ColdChef got some McSexy!
posted by NortonDC at 3:01 PM on July 18, 2002

KevinSkomsvold: no, i'm sure that was asshat.
posted by quonsar at 3:14 PM on July 18, 2002

I am coming to find the idea of copyrights more and more disagreeable, because of things like this.

This is a patent, which is more far rearching than mere copyright.
posted by holloway at 3:24 PM on July 18, 2002

FAR more interesting things were going on that evening than mere naked bongos.

ColdChef, you cannot leave this thread until you tell us all what you know.
posted by Dirjy at 3:27 PM on July 18, 2002

Does this 'clarification' actually mean anything? Because the patent itself was filed back in 1986 and you'd think that anyone holding the patent would have noticed that jpeg technology gets used here and there for this and that. Why wait until now to try to make money off it?
posted by MUD at 3:45 PM on July 18, 2002

Why wait until now to try to make money off it?

Painfully simple. What happened to all of the competing methods which were pay for usage code? They are either gone or marginalized into niche usage. What you do is conveniently "forget" to pursue violators until the code has reached a huge market saturation and THEN threaten to sue if users don't pony up some cash. Camera makers are especially vulnerable because JPEG is literally THE standard in that market - and it only established itself as such because it was free for the taking.

It's called a bait and switch...
posted by RevGreg at 4:33 PM on July 18, 2002

ODiV: For one glorious second I thoughbt you were reffering to Unisys trying to kindnap Russel Crowse and making him their secret love slave. Then sanity returned.

It was a good second though.
posted by nedrichards at 4:40 PM on July 18, 2002

Oh it's "ass hat" not "as shat"...

I was picturing a clown being defecated and it was not pretty, believe you me...
posted by jonmc at 5:16 PM on July 18, 2002

Sorry folks, but scottst has the sole and exclusive right to use and license all claims that implement asshat clowns in all "fields of use" except Metafilter.

I keep glancing at the titlebar of my browser, thinking it's saying "Forget Investor Relations." Is there a name for a Freudian slip of the eyes?
posted by Foosnark at 5:57 PM on July 18, 2002

Why wait until now to try to make money off it?

Well, if you wait until it's ubiquitous, people will pay your ransom rather than switch to something else. Start demanding royalties too early in the adoption curve and they'll just use (or invent) a different format.
posted by kindall at 6:11 PM on July 18, 2002

Sorry folks, but scottst has the sole and exclusive right to use and license all claims that implement asshat clowns in all "fields of use" except Metafilter.

Darn tootin' Foosnark. Get your checkbooks ready...

Well, if you wait until it's ubiquitous, people will pay your ransom rather than switch to something else. Start demanding royalties too early in the adoption curve and they'll just use (or invent) a different format.

Portable Network Graphics
posted by scottst at 6:44 PM on July 18, 2002

Enough with the asscrap.

Back to the point.

The answer is to always be looking at the next image format and never get complacent about the formats we use today. The broadband push in the US (which is collapsing finally) has a lot to answer for when it comes to the abandoning of more effecient image formats.

I'm going to go look for some funky Mozilla image plug-ins...
posted by krisjohn at 6:57 PM on July 18, 2002

ColdChef's taken a powder, so we'll have to rely on Smoking Gun's scan of the police report. Whatever ColdChef has heard, it's quite entertaining enough as is.

And as Fred Pyen blogged at the time, which still makes me giggle uncontrollably, "If dancing naked and playing the bongos is wrong .... I don't wanna be right."

And JPEG patent situation:

Although the "baseline" variety of JPEG is believed patent-free, there are many patents associated with some optional features of JPEG, namely arithmetic coding and hierarchical storage. For this reason, these optional features are never used on the Web.

Forgent apparently owns a patent on a "Coding system for reducing redundancy". Apparently what they are trying to do is sell -- license -- their particular redundancy-reduction method to JPEG implementors in various fields.
posted by dhartung at 8:38 PM on July 18, 2002

Portable Network Graphics

... which has achieved, um, hardly any penetration. I know I still use GIFs on my site and stuff, no PNGs anywhere. Does anyone but open-source freaks actually use PNGs?
posted by kindall at 10:29 PM on July 18, 2002

Ignoring the Asshat discussion, this patent appears to be fairly unrelated to JPEG...

The patent describes methods for compressing video basically. And not using methods at all like JPEG. The whole thing looks very odd really.
posted by sycophant at 11:09 PM on July 18, 2002

Well if Microsoft implemented proper alpha channel support for PNG on Windows as well as Mac versions of Internet Explorer, then it might stand a chance of being of real benefit.
posted by kerplunk at 3:18 AM on July 19, 2002

PNG is lossless, JPEG is lossy. They're technically different solutions for different problems. JPEG is for "real" images while PNG is a GIF replacement and intended for "synthetic" images (graphics on a web page etc). If you take a photo encoded as JPEG and save it as PNG you'll have a much bigger file.

At least, that's what I've heard. Maybe someone will try extending PNG to include lossy compression. But the comments on the w3 page (if they're still true - I don't know if they were aware of the Forgent stuff when they were written) posted by dhartung mean that this isn't a problem anyway.
posted by andrew cooke at 5:20 AM on July 19, 2002