Anyone remember CompuServe and its blustering nearly ten years ago about the GIF format? On the other hand, last August Eolas did win its equally petty and gold-digging patent infringement suit over browser plug-in architecture.
This is the kind of story that makes you go "ugh".
Reposted from The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
Austin, Texas-based Forgent Networks announced late Thursday that its Compression Labs Inc. subsidiary has filed suit against 31 companies for patent infringement — among them, Apple. Compression Labs alleges that these companies have infringed its U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672. The patent describes a "coding system for reducing redundancy" that Forgent says is integral in JPEG image compression.
If it's not one thing, it's another. The other compaines named in the suit are Adobe Systems Inc., Agfa Corp., Axis Communications Inc., Canon USA, Concord Camera Corp., Creative Labs Inc., Dell Inc., Eastman Kodak Co., Fuji Photo Film Co. U.S.A., Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Gateway Inc., HP, IBM, JASC Software, JVC Americas Corp., Kyocera Wireless Corp., Macromedia Inc., Matsushita Electric Corp. of America, Oce' North America Inc., Onkyo Corp., PalmOne Inc., Panasonic Communications Corp. of America, Panasonic Mobile Communications Development Corp. of USA, Ricoh Corp., Riverdeep Inc., Savin Corp., Thomson S.A., Toshiba Corp. and Xerox Corp.
FYI, there are two other interesting tidbits from this story that bear examination before you form an opinion on Forgent's motivations.
First, Forgent filed the suits against the above companies only after trying to get the companies to pay up beginning in 2002. Reportedly Forgent has taken in $90 million USD from deals it did cut with a few companies (none of those named in the suit, of course) in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. Sony paid a one-time licensing fee of $16 million.
The second point is that, Forgent was reluctant to answer when asked if it would hold smaller publishers of software that support JPEG liable like the larger companies named in the suit.
My Take
Forgent, like Compuserve before it, is trying to get rich quick on the backs of others. Yes, Forgent's compression algorithym is part of JPEG, just like Compuserve created the Graphical Interchange Format (GIF) file. Neither company, however, did anything with those technologies. They created them, used them for their original and limited purposes, then all but forgot them. Then, when someone else did all the work, building something much larger that found a use for these forgotten technlogies, the original creators stuck out their hands. Not right away, mind you. They waited until the technologies were so ingrained in the larger things, most notably the Web, that it put (alleged) infringers in the difficult position of having to determine which was less expensive: changing technology or paying off the extortion.
Yes, I believe Forgent is trying to extort money from whomever it believes can pay. It won't go after the smaller publishers or the shareware developers. None of them can pay. Moreover, shutting down smaller publishers would be counterproductive to stuffing Forgent's coiffeurs. The software created by smaller, independent publishers helps maintain a market for JPEG content, thus maintaining pressure on the larger publishers who can write checks Forgent is interested in cashing.
If Forgent were a good corporate citizen it would open its patented technology to the market under a GNU or similar license. It'll be—well, not really interesting, more kind of lackadaisical—to see if Forgent's case goes the route of Compuserve or Eolas.
The Upside
Under the letter of the law, Forgent apparently has grounds for recouping damages arising from the infringement. It will probably win its case, throwing the creative software industry into a mad dash to move the world and the Web toward PNG. This is a good thing for graphic designers and web surfers.
As a loss-less compressable format, 24-bit PNG (Portable Network Graphic) delivers higher quality images than JPEG, at roughly the same file size. Additionally, PNG supports alpha (e.g. genuine) transparency; neither JPEG nor GIF support genuine transparency. PNG is a superior format to either of the current Web graphic standards, but its use has been hampered by slow and reduced support in browsers.
The Eolas victory over Microsoft rocked the entire browser industry. It wasn't just Microsoft shaking in its boots (more from anger than fear, all around); every company that makes browsers and/or browser plug-ins was right there standing beside Microsoft. Most of those companies have been named in the Forgent suit, incidentally. Hopefully the events of the Eolas issue will push browser publishers to enable creative software publishers to expedite a push toward PNG for the Web.
Collateral
In terms of non-Internet use, the challenge to JPEG is nearly as ominous as it is to online usage. JPEG is the default format for long-term archival of images. Maybe we'll see a move back toward TIFF (I don't see Lempel, Ziv, and/or Welch challenge the LZW compression scheme). Or maybe PDF, with its ability to hold layers (new in PDF version 1.5), spot colors and separations, and color management profiles, has matured to the point where it will become the new defacto archive format for images as it is for textual documents.
