The JPEG patent

The company has been trying to monetize the '672 patent since 2002, and has managed to extract licensing fees from more than 30 companies, including Sony, to the tune of $90 million for use of the JPEG format. Forgent isn't exactly modest in its claims. In its press release, Forgent claims to have:

While Forgent presses on with its claims, others have expressed doubt as to whether the patent claims would stand up. The JPEG committee has issued statement saying that the committee "believes that prior art exists in areas in which the patent might claim application to ISO/IEC 10918-1 [the JPEG standard] in its baseline form". The statement was issued back in 2002, when Forgent initially began asserting patent claims.

There seems to be some confusion over the actual expiration date of Forgent's patent as well. According to Forgent, the patent expires in October 2006. Others are saying that the patent is set to expire this October, seventeen years from the date the patent was granted. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) website seems to support Forgent's position. According to the USPTO FAQ, patents granted prior to June 8, 1995 "automatically have a term that is the greater of the twenty year term discussed above [from the application date] or seventeen years from the patent grant". The patent application was submitted October 27, 1986 and granted October 6, 1987 which gives Forgent a little more than two years to harass software companies making use of JPEG.

The Independent JPEG Group (IJG), responsible for widely-used JPEG library (libjpeg), makes no mention of the Forgent claims on its website. In fact, the IJG makes little mention of anything on its website, including valid contact information. The README that comes with the JPEG library says that the software avoids the arithmetic coding of the JPEG specification due to patents owned by IBM, AT&T and Mitsubishi. No mention is made of the '672 patent. However, IJG organizer Tom Lane was quoted two years ago as saying that Forgent's patent does not apply:

At the moment, open source developers do not seem to be in a rush to remove JPEG capability from their projects, but are instead taking a "wait-and-see" attitude. The topic has come up on Debian-legal, the Gimp-developer mailing list and other project lists. So far, no project has come out to say that they would be pulling JPEG support, much to this writer's relief. A quick count shows that more than 150 packages installed on my system depend on libjpeg.

Even if Forgent's claims amount to nothing more than a nuisance for a handful of proprietary software companies, they still highlight a problem for open source software. Companies will continue to press software patent claims so long as the legal system permits, and there's money to be made. It's only a matter of time before one of the suits has a serious impact on open source.