Group Finds Prior Art On JPEG Patent; Hopefully Not Compressed As A JPEG

Legal Issues

from the all-your-jpgs-are-belong-to-us dept

A few years ago, a small company, Forgent, that owned a patent they never did anything with, suddenly decided that the patent covered the technology used in jpg compression, used across the internet for images. Instead of recognizing that the actual innovation came about having absolutely nothing to do with that patent, the company did what so many patent trolls do: they decided to sue everyone and complain about how much they were owed for doing nothing that had anything to do with the success of a technology. Companies have been fighting Forgent, but now a group claims they’ve come up with some prior art that could invalidate the patent. Of course, the process is quite involved and difficult, so it’s a bit early to say if this will have any impact. The best guess is that it won’t and the patent office will turn them down on a review. Either way, though, it doesn’t get to the core issue, of why this company that did absolutely nothing to make .jpg a useful compression format (and, didn’t even realize they had such a patent for a long time) deserves any money for doing absolutely nothing other than making it difficult for others to actually use the technology.