The JPEG Committee doesn’t appreciate Forgent Networks recent license royalty demands based on patents it obtained in a fire sale from Compression Labs, and is setting up a Prior Art website to help stop this kind of thing from happening in the future. (You know, when companies contribute a technology to an open standard in good faith and then go back on their word or sell off the patent they’ve “contributed” to the highest bidder.)

Maybe these contributions need to be more formal? (Um hmm. And maybe I need to just shut up and stop talking crazy before somebody gets hurt…I know, I know…)

The committee has examined these claims briefly, and at present believes that prior art exists in areas in which the patent might claim application to ISO/IEC 10918-1 in its baseline form. The committee have also become aware that other organisations including Philips, and Lucent may also be claiming some elements of intellectual property that might be applied to the original JPEG and JBIG (IS 11544 standards). As a response to this, the JPEG committee will be collecting, through its new web site (to be launched shortly) a substantial repository of prior art and it invites submissions, particularly where the content may be applied to claims of intellectual property. A note will be placed on the web site shortly explaining the process for such submissions.
This effort will take some time to organise, but the JPEG committee hope to have it in place prior to its next meeting in Shanghai in October 2002.
It has always been a strong goal of the JPEG committee that its standards should be implementable in their baseline form without payment of royalty and license fees, and the committee would like to record their disappointment that some organisations appear to be working in conflict with this goal.