This is to address some of the Intellectual Property statements made
against the
SVG-1.0 Recommendation
in the
SVG-1.0 Patent Statements document.
-
Apple's patent no. 5,379,129, January 3, 1995,
"Method for compositing a source and destination image using a mask image",
application filed May 8, 1992. NEW Information As of
December 17, 2001, Apple has announced a royalty-free license for this
patent.
-
Eastman Kodak's patent no. 5,459,819 October 17, 1995,
"System for custom imprinting a variety of articles with images obtained
from a variety of different sources",
application filed April 22, 1994.
Other Intellectual Property claims that affect PNG or MNG are also
addressed.
-
Forgent's patent
no. 4,698,672, October 6, 1987 (filed October 27, 1986),
"Coding system for reducing redundancy".
These patents are of interest to PNG and MNG Development because they use
some of the claimed features.
- PNG and MNG use alpha channels, and MNG can express an alpha channel as
a separate grayscale image, which would appear to infringe on Claim 1
of the Apple patent. The PNG format itself does not seem to infringe
on any claim, but PNG-supporting applications that can combine a
grayscale image and an RGB image into an RGBA image appear to infringe on
Claim 1 of the Apple patent.
- MNG can store images and later display them in a predetermined location
within a larger composition, which would appear to infringe on claims of
the Kodak patent.
- MNG's JNG subformat consists of baseline JPEG wrapped in PNG-style chunks
and might infringe on claims of Forgent's patent.
The other claims in the SVG patent statements document are difficult
or impossible for anyone with limited legal resources to analyze:
-
IBM makes a non-specific intellectual property
claim, and offers RAND licensing of any IP needed for SVG implementation.
-
Quark makes a non-specific intellectual property
claim, and offers RAND licensing of any IP needed for SVG implementation.
If you have any information on these claims that you are willing to
share, send it to
randeg@alum.rpi.edu for inclusion
on this page.
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