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The Case of the Compressed Image
By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Also published by United Press International (UPI)
Also Read:
The Disruptive Engine - Innovation
Forgent Networks from Texas wants to collect a royalty every time
someone compresses an image using the JPEG algorithm. It urges third
parties to negotiate with it separate licensing agreements. It bases
its claim on a 17 year old patent it acquired in 1997 when VTel, from
which Forgent was spun-off, purchased the San-Jose based Compression
Labs.
The patent pertains to a crucial element in the popular compression
method. The JPEG committee of ISO - the International Standards
Organization - threatens to withdraw the standard altogether. This
would impact thousands of software and hardware products.
This is only the latest in a serious of spats. Unisys has spent the
better part of the last 15 years trying to enforce a patent it owns for
a compression technique used in two other popular imaging standards,
GIF and TIFF.
BT Group sued Prodigy, a unit of SBC Communications, in a US federal
court, for infringement of its patent of the hypertext link, or
hyperlink - a ubiquitous and critical element of the Web.
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