Wired and The Register are both reporting on a patent claim made by Forgent Networks, a video-conferencing company which acquired US Patent No 4,698,672 in its purchase of Compression Labs. The patent, filed in 1986, but never before enforced, covers “methods and apparatus for processing signals to remove redundant information thereby making the signals more suitable for transfer through a limited-bandwidth medium.” This seems to apply to JPEG compression (maybe MPEG, too?). In fact, Sony has already entered into a licensing agreement with Forgent for US$15 million.
Beyond the question of whether a patent-holder should be allowed to spring something like this on people and companies who have been using this technology for the past 15 years, comes the question of how this is going to affect end-users.
Is PNG support strong enough in the major browsers that a wholesale switch is possible? Is it the impetus that’s been needed to encourage everyone to switch to this format, which has been a W3C recommendation since October 1996? Or is this going to be a repeat of the Unisys/GIF issue which raised a lot of dust and resentment, but ultimately had only minor impact on GIF usage and probably netted Unisys a lot of money?
