Friday, May 26, 2006

JPEG Patent Rejected

The USPTO has rejected the broadest claims of the JPEG image format patent held by Forgent Networks.

It's nice to see the Patent Office doing the right thing, but it's too bad that more than $100 million dollars that Forgent has extorted from industry will never be returned to its rightful owners. Forgent gets to keep that money, regardless of how the PTO rules. For nearly 19 years, this patent has stood without challenge. Now, just over a year before it was to expire, the PTO declares that it is bogus.

So, how would you feel if you had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Forgent because they threatened you with a lawsuit that, regardless of outcome, would have cost you millions (average cost of defending oneself in a patent infringement suit stands today at roughly $10 million)? How would you feel knowing that our patent system stood idlely by, while Forgent played this extortion game against hundreds of companies?

And most importantly, how do you feel knowing that this is exactly the kind of behavior that our current patent system encourages, today?

Previously:

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am really shocked at this result. I thought this would be an easy win. What does this say for our patent system!?!
Matt

9:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

confussed...

Marvin
My Photocommunity

5:41 AM  
Blogger sbackl said...

It just goes to show that sometimes the patents office suprises you for the wrong reasons, we put in a patent for a new bit of software for a halfords sat nav system that was unusual, the patent was rejected and the examples they gave were not in any way like ours, there was a similarity but that is common but the rejection was given so we gave up the idea of the patent.

6:14 AM  

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