JPEG Sued

Wired magazine reports that Forgent Networks is suing 31 hardware and software vendors for (allegedly) infringing on a 17-year-old patent on the compression algorithm used in JPEG files. The company says it acquired the patent when it purchased Compression Labs seven years ago. The patent expires Oct 2006.

The same problem occured with the GIF format. Some, like Autodesk, removed GIF from AutoCAD to avoid paying royalties to Unisys. The patent on the compression algorithm used in GIF expired June 2003.

(JPEG is used for most larger images displayed on Web sites and almost all photographs taken by digital cameras. GIF is used for smaller images on Web sites, and for simple animated images.)

More details in the Wired News article.

I recall when this first became a concern some years ago. The result was PNG (portable network graphics), which was supposed to replaced JPEG with (1) royalty-free compression; and (2) loss-less compression. Problem is, PNG is not as efficient as JPEG, and never became as popular.

Comments

[Huw]

GIF is for images with a very small colour palette. JPEG for those with a very large one.

PNG was created as a royalty free alternative to GIF - it can handle larger colour palettes, but is not intended for photographs, although it will 'do' them far better than GIF.

PNG hasn't taken off quickly probably because: 1. Browsers took a long time to include support for PNG because they only decompressed GIFs, which wasn't subject to the royalty claims. 2. Photoshop, the dominant web image creator, had (has?) an inefficient implementation of the algorithm - the file size reduction wasn't worth it.

I use PNG all the time now, and haven't had someone unable to view one for over 3 years. IrfanView seems to create the smallest file sizes for a given quality.

I'm not aware of an equivalent alternative for JPEG.

[ralphg]

Might an equivalent to JPEG be JPEG 2000?

[Huw]

From what I remember, JPEG2000 (it's a wavelet thing, isn't it?) is even more proprietary.