USPTO to re-examine JPEG patent

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JPEG patent's claim is invalid

I personnaly worked between 1985 and 1989 on image compression algorithms in France, long before the JPEG group issued its first standard. This work was held there as a research project with European financements as an "Eureka" project.

The company for which I worked got involved through a public research organized by French public research teams (the INRIA and the french telecoms which were public at that time and whose R&D department was named "CCETT", a joint research department of French telecoms and TDF, the public radio/TV broadcaster working on future candidate "HD" television standards)

At that time, lots of encoding options were considered, and the initial algorithm designs were published with free sample code written in Fortran.

My work has been to write a Intel 286 assembly-language implementationforuse within MSDOS, CP/M and Windows 286, Windows 386, and the first commercial version of Windows 3.0.
There were also parallel works to build hardware compressors for the DCT transformation. All companies working on the subject had to sign agreements for providing royaltee-free patents on the discovered or proposed enhancements, or could not even work on the JPEG project.

At that time also, beside the various "psychovisual thresholds" used to filter the DCT coefficients for various bitsizes per pixel, there was several competing options tocompressthe final stream (basically Huffman versus IBM's patented arithmetic encoding, which was only accepted as an optional option, providing that IBM accepted to provide royaltee-free licencesto this coding; that's the main reason why Huffman was chosen in the basic standard JPEG profile).

The company forwhichIworkedat that time no longer exists. But this US patent clearly break the JPEG working group policy as it also breaks the various public research agreements financed with public money in various countries (in US and Europe.)

This company is stealing public money with itsreally unfair patent claim, and breaks the royalte-free agreements on patents that were signed by all participants to the standardization (and notably in China, Singapore, and Japan, where compression-helper chips were designed for later tests and integration within display boards or in audio/video devices). All of these works in the JPEG group for static images were extended later for adaptation to motion pictures in the later MPEG group.

I remember that during these years, there were LOTS of contributions from public institutions worldwide, including US university labs.

That patent claim stinks! Don't pay for it, what the company challenging is theft and abuse of public assets !

Posted by: PhilippeV   Posted on: 02/06/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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