[Freegis-list] Re: ECW and MrSID and JPEG2K

[Roger Bedell]

Hmm,

In this thread there is the following from Wesley Falter
mailto:wesley at felter.org


"My understanding is that the patents necessary for the basic part of
JPEG 2000 are licensed to everyone for free. That's not as good as if
there were no patents covering it, but at least it shouldn't prevent
implementations."

I've copied this thread to him, perhaps he can shed some light on this.
It seems like a similar problem as the one a few months back about the
patents involved with SVG.

Roger Bedell, President, Sylvan Ascent Inc.
roger at sylvanmaps.com
www.sylvanmaps.com
www.topodepot.com
505-758-7712


-----Original Message-----
From: freegis-list-admin at intevation.de
[mailto:freegis-list-admin at intevation.de] On Behalf Of Bernhard Reiter
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 1:43 PM
To: freegis-list at intevation.de
Subject: [Freegis-list] Re: ECW and MrSID and JPEG2K

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 01:30:11PM -0600, Roger Bedell wrote:
> Both Lizardtech (MrSID) and ErMapper have patents on their compression
> technology. MrSIDs patents were from LANL, ErMapper did their own.
They
> both use Wavelet compression technology. Another technology that no
one
> uses (but should!) is Jpeg2000 which is an open format using wavelet
> compression. I've done some trials using it which show similar
> compression results to the others. There are some open source
> implementations of Jpeg2K as well.

I've heard that jpeg2000 is also patent encumbered.
	http://www.advogato.org/article/327.html

This would mean unless the patent is licensed to everybody
unlimited without royalties (basically completely rendering the
patent useless) Free Software implementations cannot exist.

You always would have restriction on the freedom to use the software
for all purposes.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3226 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.intevation.de/pipermail/freegis-list/attachments/20020618/8e478c35/smime.p7s