Claimed JPEG Patent to be Re-Examined

The Patent Office has granted a review of the claimed JPEG patent at the request of the Public Patent Foundation, a not-for-profit legal services foundation.

Forgent, an intellectual property company*, currently holds U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672 (known as the '672 patent) which it acquired when it bought Compression Labs in 1997. When the company audited its patents, it believed that the '672 patent covered the JPEG compression technique used in digital cameras and PCs and started to aggressively pursue companies that use this common format in 1994. Estimates are 100+ million dollars in payments have already been made and Forgent is going after camera makers now; estimating the patent's ultimate worth at one billion dollars.

The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) claims to be a "not-for-profit legal services organization that represents the public's interests against the harms caused by the patent system, particularly the harms caused by wrongly issued patents and unsound patent policy" (according to their website). Their board of directors includes Daniel B. Ravicher, President and Executive Director (Ravicher is a registered patent attorney), Brian kahin, Director (Kahin is Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan), Eben Moglen, Director (Moglen is Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation), and Arti K. Rai, Director (Rai is Professor of Law at Duke Law School).

PUBPAT has had some success in limiting the scope of some patents in the past according to news releases on their website.

More Information

• PUBPAT Press Release
• PDF of PUBPAT Request to Patent Office

* An intellectual property company is a company that collects patents and other intellectual property and milks money out of others using that intellectual property instead of actually using the property to create something.