USPTO Rules Fogent JPEG Patent Invalid

fistfullast33l writes "Groklaw has reported that the USPTO has ruled the broadest claims of the JPEG Patent held by Fogent to be invalid. PUBPAT, the organization that requested the review, released the news earlier today. According to PJ, the ruling will be hard to overturn as the 'submitters knew about the prior art but failed to tell the USPTO about it.'"

Excellent timing

[Vengeance]

Considering Microsoft's new graphics file format, an unencumbered JPG format is a rather handy thing to have out there.

Re:Hard to overturn but...Not Enough!

[RsG]

Or revoke their corporate charter and bar the executives from doing business again. I'm all in favour of invoking this sort of punishment - it beats the hell outa fines, and ensures fewer repear offenders. Call it a corporate "death penalty", and I'm sure that it'll find support in the conservative parts of the US :-)

Does this mean that Linux can now support JPEG?

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

Does this mean that Linux can now support JPEG, since it's now unencumbered by patents? Hurray!!

Re:Yeah, but is it enough?

[Sycraft-fu]

You are correct that JPEG2000 is a new set of patents, despite the name, it's vastly different technology.

However PNG as good as JPEG, are you out of your damn mind? PNGs are MASSIVE, they aren't as big as RAW files, but that's it. They don't even approach JPEG sizes for photos.

For example, I have a photo here of a cute kitten loaded in Photoshop. According to PS, it's about 791k raw inside PS itself. If I tell it to save it as a PNG 24-bit, the sizes goes down to 317k. Good bit of compression, but still large for the web. However if I switch it over to JPEG compression and set it to use the maximum quality profile, it is only 69k and is subjectively the exact same quality on my monitor. Medium is the first level where there's noticable degradation, and it's down to 37k there. Even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant using 8-bit palettized PNG (which is lossy since you lose colours) it's still 172k, over double the largest JPEG.

PNG is great for lots of things, but JPEG it ain't. You don't want to try using PNG for large pictures on the web, it'll screw over anyone on dialup. With sizes as much as 10x a JPEG file, it's just not feasable.

Re:Hard to overturn but...

[Mistshadow2k4]

Considering that they knew about the prior art and have been trolling with the patent against software-makers using the jpeg format, I vote for them being tried for extortion. Why is it that in cases where some company claims they have a patent or copyright on something and its later proven that they don't that they're not charged with extortion (yeah, I'm thinking of SCO too)?