Forgent Networks Won Jpeg Patents and started sueing Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, etc.

[Inspiron 0]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office agreed earlier this week to a request by the Public Patent Foundation to review a controversial patent that Forgent Networks has been attempting to enforce through lawsuits with dozens of companies, including Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, RIM and Google.

 

Forgent acquired the rights to the JPEG compression patent through a 1997 purchase of Compression Labs, however it did not start asserting its ownership and demanding licensing for the patent until a year ago.

 

Full article : http://betanews.com/2006/02/02/uspto-to-reconsider-jpeg-patent/

 

This is going to be crazy. If Forgent Networks continue sueing companies that uses JPEG without license, this world is going into chaos. Definately this company will lose its reputation as more people and organisation is using JPEG as a standard picture format. On the other hand, Forgent Networks will be making tons and tons of money by sueing companies, or rather they can do that for a business already. There's endless number of people using JPEG files.

[rvalkass 5]

Any company that produces image editing software, digital camera manufacturers, scanner manufacturers and all other sorts of people are going to end up bankrupt if they are sued for using JPEG images in their systems. Virtually every person on the planet with a PC will need to aquire a licence simply to open their existing files, if they take this to it's full extent. Surely if something has become so integrated into public use and many hundreds of thousands of systems the patent can't really be enforced.

[Earths Daughter 0]

Maybe they're just doing it for free publicity, and intend to drop it after a while. They may even be doing it to try to get one of the big companies like Microsoft to buy them out for a bundle. If they want to sell the company, that would be a pretty good move. And since .gifs are public now, I doubt anybody that bought them out would keep .jpegs proprietary. If they're serious about the lawsuits, though, there may be some sort of law about letting things get into general public use for years, then suddenly demanding patent license fees or royalties for it.Many years ago, there was a pencil and paper RPG company (the one that made and owned Dungeons & Dragons) that came out with a RPG based on the first Indiana Jones movie. They copyrighted a whole bunch of game terms at once, and while they were at it, they slipped in the word "Nazi". It got by unnoticed, and for a while, TSR games actually owned the copyright to the word "Nazi"! Then some people who played the game noticed the little copyright symbol next to the word "Nazi" and checked to see if they actually had copyrighted it, or it was just a recurring typo. When they found out it was copyrighted, word got out, and it was challenged, I think on the fact that it had been in public use for so long, and the copyright was revoked. So maybe something similar will happen here, I don't know if they can use the same law about public usage or not. I think I may still have a copy of that game or a module for it lying around somewhere. Maybe it's a collector's item now? Lol.