JPEG Patent Claim Surrendered!:
Here you go, straight from the Public Patent Foundation’s press release: Forgent Networks has stopped asserting its patent against JPEG, has dropped all its pending cases that were
asserting the patent, and says that it won’t file any other infringement claims based on the patent. You’ll recall that PubPat challenged the patent last year and the USPTO reexamination led to rejection of the broadest claims.
On its website page on the Forgent Networks JPEG Related Patent, PubPat provides the history:
PUBPAT filed a formal request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in November 2005 to revoke the patent Forgent Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: FORG) is widely asserting against the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) international standard for the electronic sharing of photo-quality images. In its filing, PUBPAT submitted previously unseen prior art showing that the patent, which was issued in 1987 to Forgent’s subsidiary Compression Labs Inc., was not new and, as such, should be revoked. The PTO granted PUBPAT’s request in February 2006 and rejected the broadest claims of the patent in May 2006. In November 2006, Forgent abandoned all assertion of the patent.
You can get the legal filing and the USPTO orders from that page. Hey, sometimes there’s good news. Not all the news stories can be about somebody’s corporate strategy to steal Red Hat’s customers.
