Page 147 - ITU Journal, ICT Discoveries, Volume 3, No. 1, June 2020 Special issue: The future of video and immersive media

ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 3(1), June 2020

• Its own separate documentation designation (JPEG-nnn).
• Its own specifications (e.g. JPEG-8, -9) that after JPEG approval were submitted to the parent standards
development organizations (SDOs) for independent formal approval as ITU-T and ISO/IEC JTC1
standards.
• Its own intellectual property right (IPR) policies (especially patent policy), with a different tenour to
what at that time were still emerging ITU and ISO patent policies. While JPEG was basically royalty-free
(RF), ISO and ITU had a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) patent policy. The JPEG collected
known patents related to the JPEG format based on information from its members. Such information
was then published as Annex L of ITU-T T.81 | ISO/IEC 10918-1 [1], which was unique at that time.
The principles of formal collaboration on information technology, particularly with the ISO/IEC Joint
Technical Committee 1 (JTC1), were given later in 1988 in CCITT A.22 [36]. After 1988, JPEG and the new
CCITT and ISO committee working on common procedures worked in parallel. ITU later published ITU-T A.23
[5] (Figs. 2 and 3). The same document was also approved and published by ISO/IEC JTC1. However, by that
time the work on the JPEG-1 format was already finished.
The JPEG committee was from the very beginning in contact with the group that developed ITU-T A.23 [5], and
was one of the first groups that used the common standards template.
Nevertheless, after formal adoption of ITU-T A.23 [5] in 1993 (when JPEG-1 had already been developed),
JPEG had de facto lost its unique working rules and methods (e.g. the patent policy of an RF baseline mode and
RAND optional JPEG components) it earlier enjoyed. So, in 1993 the blue RF patent policy regime zone changed
to an orange RAND patent policy regime zone (see Fig. 1). The lack of a common RF patent policy regime across
ITU, ISO and IEC later became a persistent issue in the history of JPEG. In addition, the formal three-step
approval process by ISO/IEC JTC1 took substantially more time than that required for JPEG to develop its
specification.

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