In 2002, a company that has the patent on the JPG technology started enforcing their patent.
They did so after waiting till JPG had become the industry standard and up till that point had kept quiet about it to make sure the prospect of patent enforcement did not hamper its uptake.. Once JPG reached maximium usage, out comes the lawsuits “you owe us millions”.
In a very similiar move to the SCO debarkle.. company has sliding revenue and not much in the way of future prospects, company buys some IP from another company, company goes after other companies for IP infringment, and sue them for millions and companies original business goes down the tubes in favour of lawsuits.
The company in this case is called Forgent Network and before they bought the JPG IP, they were called VTel and made video conferencing hardware.
The list of companies being sued is huge: Adobe Systems, Agfa, Apple, Canon USA, Eastman Kodak, Fuji Photo Film USA, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Macromedia, PalmOne, Savin, Toshiba and Xerox.
What’s interesting is that for once Microsoft isn’t on the list.. I have my suspicions as to why, but I’ll keep that to myself I think.
My suggestion is to start swapping all your images to the PNG format. PNG is superior to JPG in nearly every way, and its an open standard, so using it can in no way make you liable to anything.
There really is no reason not to use png to replace jpeg images in your web page, most if not all the current crop of imaging programs can handle png’s, they look better and they can be smaller. All my future images will be in the png format. (It doesn’t hurt that png is the native format to MacroMedia Fireworks either.)
For more info, please see: Mac observer
While on the subject, you should consider png to replace gif images as well, it’s just technically better. Smaller filesize, more color, more features etc. see:
w3c
rgds
Franki
