JBIG1 patent information

by Markus Kuhn

For many years, the doubts about the patent situation had prevented the JBIG1 standard from becoming widely used on the Internet (e.g., as of 2012, no web browser has support for it integrated). As the author of a freely available JBIG1 implementation, I was interested in the patent license requirements for the JBIG1 standard. This page describes what I had learned.

On 2012-04-04, the last of the known JBIG1 patents expired. The JBIG1 standard was approved and published in March 1993 (WTSC, Helsinki), and a final draft (WG9-S1R5.1) had been widely circulated in April 1992. So any claims in patents filed after April 1992 have to stand against the JBIG1 final draft as prior art, and anything filed before would by now (more than 20 years later) have expired. So this page is now just of historic interest.

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 ...

The Patent Lens links above can help 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.

The core patents were the ones owned by IBM on the QM coder, but IBM had waived the need to pay them licence fees for implementations of the JPEG/JBIG standards (see below). Some of the other patents were 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.

US 4973961 protected a truely trivial programming technique and could be circumvented with a slightly more clumsy way of coding the arithmetic encoder. US 5023611 related 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.

Mitsubishi patents

Mitsubishi did not provide exact references to their JBIG1 patents at the time Appendix E of the standard was written. However, they eventually sent me a list of their patents that they considered relevant to JBIG1. On this list, the last patent family to expire worldwide included US5307062 (expired 2011-04-26) and US5404140 (expired 2012-04-04).

These two US patents disclosed exactly the same invention, namely the conditional MPS/LPS exchange that the JBIG1 arithmetic codec performs if the LPS sub-interval is larger than the MPS sub-interval (see paragraphs 6.8.2.5, 6.8.2.6, and the “A < LSZ[ST[CX]]?” test in figures 23, 24, 33, 34 in the standard). This trick is used by all JBIG1 implementations and is not an optional part of the standard. The above two US patents differ only in trivial editorial changes in the description and the later patent has a longer list of claims (which all just rephrase in many different ways the exact same technical idea). In all other countries (except for Japan), the list gives only a single equivalent patent.

The above two US patents expired relatively late, as they still fell under the old publication-date-plus-17-years rule. In other countries, the equivalent patents (AU633187, CA2036992, DE6912881, FR/GB/EP0444543, KR940005514 (10-0077510), HK1008764) all expired before 2011-02-26, i.e. 21 years after the original Japanese patent had been filed on 1990-02-26.

So, as far as I understand (IANAPL):
JBIG1 has been free of patent-licencing requirements worldwide since 2012-04-04

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.
• 2009-09-28: The Corporate Licensing Division of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation wrote to me that they charged 5000 USD for their remaining JBIG1 patent family.

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 2013-02-01 – http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/jbigkit/patents.html