[Free-sklyarov-uk] Bruce Perens

[Chris Lightfoot]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 08:04:23PM +0000, Edward Welbourne wrote:
> > Yeah, that's true, but at least most of the work would by
> > necessity be done by people in the United States.
> grumble grumble ... but it'd affect us at www.Opera.com in Norway.

Would it? You'd have to integrate support for whatever
free standard replaces it, and perhaps arrange that builds
of Opera shipped to customers in the United States had
JPEG support stubbed out, but that's probably not an
immense amount of work.

(Actually, a brief skim of the claims in the patent -- no.
4,698,672, which you can find from
    http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm
doesn't suggest that the patent covers decompressing data
coded in JPEG; it's possible that it's in the other patent
which is supposed to relate to digital video and I haven't
read. Certainly the ridiculous Unisys GIF thing only
covered compression.... Another thing to note about the
patent is that it's pretty unreadable and it wouldn't be a
good document to start from if you wanted to implement an
image coding scheme, which means that it fails to fulfil
the basic purpose of a patent. But I digress....)

> It'd also affect lots of Asian businesses that make quality cameras and
> so on.

Well, this is true, inasmuchas they probably want to sell
their cameras in the United States. They too could stub
out JPEG support (most of these digital cameras will save
images in an uncompressed format too) and there would then
grow up in the United States a black market in imported
cameras which supported non-sucking image formats.


Not, of course, that I expect these people to react in
this way: they'll pay up, and the next time somebody with
a bogus patent tells them to jump, they'll ask `how high?'
again, just like they always have. No point in playing
politics with profits, after all.


-- 
``Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.''
  (Bertrand Russell)