First Gif, now Jpeg. Let the Litigation Begin.
A company named “Fogent“ is claiming that it owns the rights to the JPEG patent and is suing the pants off of IBM, Apple, and 29 other big guns [1]. Now if software patents should be valid, JPEG compression should definately be a patentable technology. After all, it is rather complex and isn't something anyone is going to come up with over the weekend. However, the patent Fogent is using [2] (4,698,672) is dated “October 27, 1986,“ and Fogent didn't even start pushing companies to license until 2002, which makes their claims quite annoying. After all, I would be willing to bet that one of the major reasons that JPEG gained acceptance as a standard was the very fact that it didn't have royalities associated with it! Maybe today is too early to overhaul the entire patent system, but the USPTO should at least start requiring people submitting patents to submit information about their licensing strategy as well. This way, the USPTO could examine licensing strategies to make sure that companies wouldn't be able to use their patent storehouses to kill innovation. If, for example, a company had no immediate plans to license their technology, then the patent should be invalidated, because its existence will merely stifle innovation by others. This might require a 2 stage submission process, since licensing decisions usually come later in the game than invention, but there could at least be something like a 2 year window in which a licensing strategy must be submitted along with the patent.