E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

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This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Burn all JPEGs?

Some recent news is giving me flashbacks to 1995, when Unisys sprung their GIF patent surprise on the young World Wide Web. We got quite angry and some enterprising people even built a replacement for the beloved GIF.

Are we going there again? Forgent, a Texas company that "develops and licenses intellectual property and makes scheduling software" (it makes me feel dirty just to type that) is suing 40 companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo, for infringing on JPEG-related patent No. 4,698,672.

The most distressing line in the above-linked article:

Following the filing of the litigation, five companies that were defendants have entered into license agreements.

As you can see on the relevant Wikipedia page, the patent issue hasn't come totally out of the blue. JPEG2000 (doesn't that sound quaint?) isn't in the clear either. And this Slashdot piece tells me that even GIF has lingering IP problems, despite the expiration of the Unisys patent.

What a mess. At least they're losing money -- hopefully implosion will follow.

Sometimes I feel like a crazy idealist for promoting open formats. Not today.

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005
+ +
2 comments

Some related posts: Songbird almost-0.2 • International Freedom From Stupid Software Patents Day • Goodbye, SCO • Yahoo offers DRM-free music, sort of • Xiph, Ogg, FLAC, et al. • Songbird, open source competition for iTunes • Hopeful news from the USPTO • Sony DRM news roundup • Sony gets spanked • The fall of Sony
• Comment from suzanne, later that day

Wired ran a interesting interview with Forgent's CEO back in June of this year. Besides suing for the alleged violation of the jpeg patent, the same company claims to own a "DVR patent" that supercedes Tivo's even though Forgent's was apparently issued after Tivo's. Wired calls it "patent trolling." That seems about right. The interview is at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/start.html?pg=13

• Comment from Paul, later that day

Nice find, Suzanne, thanks. I also found a Wired News story from April 2004 which covers Forgent suing 31 companies -- many of the same ones, I presume.

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