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The Forgent Demand Letters for JPEG Royalties
Posted May 31, 2005 – 4:05 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in Standards(This post was part of a separate “Standards Blog” which has been merged into my main blog)
About a month ago I wrote about the Forgent JPEG Patent saga. Recently a faithful reader sent me a copy of a demand letter sent on behalf of Forgent (to a company that shall remain unnamed). I have taken the liberty of transcribing the letter into PDF and HTML, making it available here (I removed the information of the company to whom the letter was originally sent). There are three documents:
- Pages 2 and 3 of the actual letter demanding royalties (PDF or HTML)
- Copy of the press release (PDF or HTML)
- Partial list of companies already licensing the Forgent patent (PDF or HTML)
From the letter a few interesting things emerge. First of all, it seems that Forgent hired a law firm and a licensing firm for this. The law firm is probably acting like the bad cop, prodding people into compliance; while the licensing firm is the good cop offering terms. Second, what they want is 1.5% of all product sales which for companies like Microsoft will translate into a lot of money. Third, they are explictly going after the JPEG standard which means that any open source software and companies distributing it are at risk. They are also not stopping at going after big companies but are even looking for smaller fish as well.
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By The Internet Standards Blog ? Blog Archive ? Forgent, Round 3 on Jun 2, 2005