Måns Rullgård wrote: > Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >>On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 12:38:15AM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: >>>Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >>>>Their patent expires *really* soon, like, a few months away. It's >>>>likely that the issue will become moot. >>> >>>One patent in their portfolio expires between 2007 and 2014. >> >>Random patents in their portfolio that aren't relevant to JPEG aren't >>interesting. This one expires in October. > > I asked a couple of days ago, but nobody replied. Does anyone know > anything about the patent status of JPEG-2000? Is it safe to use it?
I don't know if the JPEG patent under discussion here also covers JPEG-2000. From what I saw in the JasPer discussion (in which the license progressed from extremely non-free to clearly DFSG-free and BSD-like), there are already several patents over the JPEG-2000 format, but the patent holders have stated that any "conformant implementation" (that implements the standard exactly) is always allowed. The patent holders also stated that they might choose to go after those who don't implement the standard, but so far they have not actually done so. For that reason, I would put JPEG-2000 in the category of all the other software in Debian that is probably covered by many different patents (progress bar, etc): leave it unless someone actually starts enforcing the patent, and decide what to do then, and in the meantime don't go looking for patents that affect the software. - Josh Triplett
