I was just reading the DIGIT magazine (sold in the UK) and I came across
this article that says that Forgent Networks, a US company, claims to have a
patent to the JPEG image-compression technology, and that they are going to
license it to makers of design hardware that use JPEG. I'm not quite sure
about the software side of it because they didn't mention it on the article,
but Hakon Lie, chief technical officer of Opera Software, says that:
   "If it becomes impossible to use JPEG, we will have to find other
    processes. We did that before, developing PNG when GIF was patented by
    Unisys. But that was a long process, and it's hard to remove older
    technology, so I hope we don't have to go through it again".

On the other hand, Tom Lane, organizer of the Independent JPEG group says
that the patent described by Forgent Networks is clearly not like JPEG.

Do you guys think that it is going the same way GIF went?

What about you guys over there in US, do you have any news about it?

Just wanted to let you guys know if you haven't already heard it.

All the best

Fidel.

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