Page 165 - 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

documentation must state that "this software is based in part on the work
of the Independent JPEG Group".

(3) Permission for use of this software is granted only if the user accepts
full responsibility for any undesirable consequences; the authors accept
NO LIABILITY for damages of any kind.
These conditions apply to any software derived from or based on the IJG
code, not just to the unmodified library. If you use our work, you ought
to acknowledge us.

Permission is NOT granted for the use of any IJG author's name or company
name in advertising or publicity relating to this software or products
derived from it. This software may be referred to only as "the Independent
JPEG Group's software".
We specifically permit and encourage the use of this software as the basis
of commercial products, provided that all warranty or liability claims are
assumed by the product vendor.”
----------------------------
As previously noted, the JPEG also had its own patent policy. The so-called baseline mode (which was common
to all JPEG variants to enable interoperability among all JPEG coders) had to be RF. On JPEG, optional feature
RAND licensing was permitted. The arithmetic coder mentioned in paragraph e) was such a RAND component.
It was only optional, so it could be left out from a given use and implementation. The IJG first implemented the
arithmetic coder, but when they found out that it was a royalty-bearing component, they immediately
removed it from the open source code.

------------------------------
From IJG Software Library “Readme” file by Tom Lanes

“It appears that the arithmetic coding option of the JPEG spec is covered by
patents owned by IBM, AT&T, and Mitsubishi. Hence, arithmetic coding cannot legally
be used without obtaining one or more licenses. For this reason, support for
arithmetic coding has been removed from the free JPEG software. (Since arithmetic
coding provides only a marginal gain over the unpatented Huffman mode, it is
unlikely that very many implementations will support it.) So far as we are aware,
there are no patent restrictions on the remaining code.”

Author’s note – All JPEG-1 patents have now expired.
------------------------------
This was a very important lesson to learn very early on: OSS does not like components that are not
royalty free. The JPEG Recommendation | International Standard was formally approved by ISO/IEC JTC1
and ITU-T, respectively, under the ISO, IEC and ITU-T RAND joint patent policy regime. However, de facto the
baseline mode of JPEG remained RF. We see today the same phenomenon when some fast-track and publicly
available specification (PAS) drafts come to JTC1. The specification is first developed by an SDO or consortium
(e.g. the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards (OASIS), Ecma International) under an RF patent policy regime, but then later also approved by
JTC1 under RAND one. Of course, with the limitation that the JTC1 approval can from a technical point of view
be either “yes” or “no” (but no technical modification). With JPEG-1, de facto this was the case too.
Feedback into the standardization cycle: This is theoretically possible, and in many cases actually useful.
However, for JPEG-1 this was not the case. Some members of the JPEG Committee themselves had a few early
JPEG-1 implementations in both software and hardware. Those experiences have been shared with other JPEG
committee members and provided the necessary feedback to the standardization part of JPEG. Nevertheless,
in other standardization projects, this might be an interesting asset.

© International Telecommunication Union, 2020 143