Petteri Pyyny
18 Jul 2002 13:30
Out of nowhere a company called Forgent Networks has came to center of public eye claiming that they own JPEG patents and now claim that all software manufacturers who use JPEG technology, have to pay licensing fees to the company.
The full announcement can be found from here. Sounds pretty amazing, since JPEG has been generally considered as "patent-free" picture format and is probably the most popular image format in the world. There's a huge debate going on over this claim, probably best place to check out people's opinions is (not very surprisingly) Slashdot.
Yet another proof that useless software patents should be removed from patent laws in U.S. and never to be introduced within EU.