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The Never Ending JPEG Patent Saga

(This post was part of a separate “Standards Blog” which has been merged into my main blog)

Last April a company called Forgent Networks initiated 31 lawsuits against various companies using the JPEG format based on an old US Patent # 4,698,672 which Forgent acquired by buying up some other company. The patent was known as early as 2002 when they put up a press release on their website. The format itself is an international standard called ” ISO/IEC IS 10918-1″ or “ITU-T Recommendation T.81″. Another interesting twist is that the patent was issued on October 6th, 1987 which means that it expires 18 years later – on October 6th, 2005. Given such short timeframe and the tendency for patent lawsuits to drag out forever, what gain what Forgent have from this?

The latest twist in this drama is a series of lawsuits between Forgent and Microsoft. It seems that after discussions with Forgent didn’t work out, Microsoft sued to have the patents declared invalid. As shown previously with the famous Eolas patent, Microsoft might have been sucessfuly with convincing the W3C to support it and this will probably be no different. Given that the ISO, the ITU and the JPEG comitee are not exactly approving of this patent, there will probably be a range of letters from these bodies to the USPTO once the lawsuit proceeds.

A connected question comes to mind is to why does Microsoft bother suing Forgent? Why not drag out the discussions even further and then wait for the patent to expire? The answer is that patent holders can sue for past damages even once the patent has expired. That means that Forgent can sue every single software and hardware maker that used JPEG in the last 15 years and make it off with a load of cash. This is exactly why Microsoft wants to pre-empt this instead of paying damages for the use of JPEG in Windows and IE (of course they can always settle and then sic Forgent on the open source folks).

Of course all of these combined with the GIF patent controversy just shows more reasons why a patent-free format like PNG is preferable as a standard. This also highlights the increasing problem with the current IPR system which can let a patent holder sue someone almost two decades after the patent is issued AND widely used worldwide.

Tags: ipr, patents —

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