JBIG1 patent information

by Markus Kuhn

For many years, the doubts about the patent situation have prevented the JBIG1 standard from becoming widely used on the Internet (e.g., not a single web browser has support for it integrated). As the author of a freely available JBIG1 implementation, I am interested in the current patent license requirements for the JBIG1 standard. This page describes what I have found out so far.

Patent list

Annex E of the JBIG1 standard (ITU-T Recommendation T.82(1993) and International Standard ISO/IEC 1154 4:1993), lists the following patents filed in the home country of the applicant and says that a license for these might be required to implement the standard:

US patents filed before 1995-08-06 expire 17 years after the patent issue date shown on front of the patent (INID code 45), or 20 years after the application date of the earliest related application shown on front of the patent (INID codes 62 or 63), whichever is later. More on how to calculate patent expiry dates in other countries ...

Check the Patent Lens links above to find related patent filings in other countries. For Japanese patents see the Industrial Property Digital Library.

The owners of the above patents have filed with the ISO and ITU a statement of willingness to grant a license under these rights on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to applications desiring to obtain such a license. These statements are recorded in the ITU Patents Database.

JBIG-KIT comes without any patent licence. I do not know for sure, which patents still affect which use of JBIG in which country. Some of the ones listed have already expired. The most important patents are the ones owned by IBM on the QM coder, but there are rumours that IBM has waived the need to pay them licence fees for implementations of the JPEG/JBIG standards (see below). Some of the other patents are not applicable if progressive coding is not used (which is not needed by many applications, including the T.85 fax profile). In some countries, non-commercial and research use of patented ideas does not require a license anyway. I have not yet found the time to go through all the individual claims in these patent and make a list which ones JBIG-KIT might be affected by each or not, and which claims might not actually be valid due to prior art.

In any case, the last of the U.S. patents listed above to expire is US 4973961 on 2010-02-12, the corresponding European Patent EP 0443255 expires 2010-12-13 and the Japanese equivalent on 2011-02-12.

US 4973961 protects a truely trivial programming technique and could be circumvented with a slightly more clumsy way of coding the arithmetic encoder. The second last patent to expire is US 5023611, which relates to the adaptive template pixel. Use of the latter can easily be switched off in the encoder (just set MX=0), but its support is required in any decoder that claims T.85 compliance. This patent will have expired globally by 2010-07-29 at the very latest.

Mitsubishi did not provide exact references to their JBIG1 patents at the time Appendix E of the standard was written, however they recently sent me a list of their patents that they consider relevant to JBIG1. On this list, US5307062 and US5404140 are the last to expire worldwide (2011-04-26 and 2012-04-04, respectively) as they still fall under the old publication-date-plus-17-years rule. All the other patents on Mitsubishi’s list, including all non-U.S. patents, will have expired by 2011-02-25. I have yet to look into, which aspect of JBIG1, if any, these patents actually claim and what related prior art was published at the time of their application.

So, as far as I understand currently (IANAPL), JBIG1 will be free of known patents in the United States from 2012-04-04 onwards, at the very latest, and outside the United States, JBIG1 will be patent free already from 2011-02-25.

Contacts

Annex E of JBIG1 also provides contact addresses for patent information:

Director, Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (formerly CCITT)
International Telecommunication Union
Place des Nations
CH-1211 Genève 20
Switzerland
Tel: +41 (22) 730 5111
Fax: +41 (22) 730 5853

ITTF
International Organization for Standardization
1, rue de Varembé
CH-1211 Genève 20
Switzerland
Tel: +41 (22) 734 0150
Fax: +41 (22) 733 3843

Program Manager
Licensing Intellectual Property and Licensing Services
IBM Corporation
208 Harbor Drive
P.O. Box 10501
Stamford, Connecticut 08904-2501
Tel: +1 (203) 973 7935
Fax: +1 (203) 973 7981
  or +1 (203) 973 7982

Mitsubishi Electric Corp.
Intellectual Property License Department
1-2-3 Morunouchi, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo 100
Japan
Tel: +81 (3) 3218 3465
Fax: +81 (3) 3215 3842

International Affairs Department
Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. Ltd.
3-2 Nishishinjuku 2-chome Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 163
Japan
Tel: +81 (3) 3347 6457
Tel: +81 (3) 3347 6470 

AT&T Intellectual Property Division Manager
Room 3A21
10 Independence Blvd. Warren, NJ 07059
USA
Tel: +1 (908) 580 5392
Fax: +1 (908) 580 6355

Senior General Manager
Corporate Intellectual Property and Legal Headquarters
Canon Inc.
30-2 Shimomaruko 3-chome
Ohta-ku, Tokyo 146
Japan
Tel: +81 (3) 3758 2111
Fax: +81 (3) 3756 0947

Information received from these so far:

• 2000-08-01: All the JBIG1 related AT&T patents are now owned by Lucent Technologies and can be licensed for a lump sum of 15000 USD. For more information and a patent license agreement, contact Larry Greenberg (greenberg at lucent.com), Jim Finnegan, or Peter Crefeld (pcrefeld at lucent.com) at Lucent. They told me that they have made a general commitment to Standards Bodies that they will be non-discriminatory in this licensing, therefore they cannot offer a free license for non-commercial implementations or applications.
• 2002-11-18: I have received a report that Lucent has increased its JBIG1 patent licence fee from 15000 USD to 50000 USD on 2002-10-01. If this is true, it would be very disappointing, especially considering that the original patent owner AT&T had filed a declaration with ISO and ITU in which they promised that they would make the essential patents available for 5000 USD and the optional ones (e.g., the progressive coding techniques that are not used in T.85 fax) for an additional 10000 USD.

JBIG2 license waiver

I read with great interest in Annex I of the final draft for JBIG2 (ISO/IEC FCD 14492, ITU-T T.88) that IBM has agreed to license the arithmetic encoding patents free of charge to JBIG2 implementors. Apparently, the IBM IPR statement provided for JPEG2000 (ISO/IEC 15444 and ITU-T T.800) and JBIG2 allows no-royalty use of the patents on a certain list for “any WG1 standard”, which refers to the ISO/IEC working group that comprises both JBIG and JPEG. This sounds very much like IBM will allow royalty-free use of the patents on that list for JBIG1 as well.

Thanks to Sebestyen Istvan and William Rucklidge from the JPEG/JBIG committee (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1 and ITU-T SG8) for helpful information.

See also

• JBIG Questions and Answers: What is the patent situation with JBIG?

created 2002-07-29 – last modified 2009-12-15 – http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/jbigkit/patents.html