Patent 6,714,202 (APNG/MNG-related)

[Glenn Randers-Pehrson]

Patent 6,714,202 seems to extend or replace MNG somehow.  Does the proposed
MNG "PLAY" chunk encroach on the claims of this patent?  For that matter, does
MNG itself (DEFI/IHDR/JHDR being "image" blocks and MOVE/CLIP/SHOW/etc
being "control" blocks) encroach on the patent (or vice versa)?

Does APNG encroach on the patent?

Glenn

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[John Bowler]

>Patent 6,714,202 seems to extend or replace MNG somehow.  

According to freepatentsonline.com it was filed on Nov. 30, 2000.  It
references MNG 0.96 dated Jul. 19, 1999, GIF 89a and JPEG 2000.  The MNG 1.0
spec is dated Feb 9, 2001 but I suspect this was substantially unchanged
from whatever was published by Nov 30, 2000.

The patent authors admit that MNG was under development when they wrote the
patent.

>Does the proposed MNG "PLAY" chunk encroach on the claims of this patent?  

Personally I find the patent incomprehensible.  My general impression is
that it looks like a simple rewrite of an early MNG spec.  It seems to
contain a number of formulae that may have been copied directly from the
spec, e.g. in the area of image compositing (it doesn't seem to reference
the known art with respect to these equations.)

The invention claims to be simplifying the MNG spec.  However what it
*might* actually do (like I said, I find it incomprehensible) is to
introduce a more complex control structure.  E.g. it might be dispensing
with the MNG streamability in order to allow re-use of arbitrary image
blocks.

Whatever it says in the "summary" of the invention the thirteen claims seem
to cover almost any animation format based on display of a succession of
"images" ("image" does not seem to be defined!)  In particular the claims
cover, apparently, a format where successive frames (MNG use) of the
animation are produced by combination of "images" from the format under the
control of a general computer program ("instructions") also encoded in the
format.

I didn't review the "summary", doing so is probably a waste of time - from a
brief scan the summary just looks like a subset of MNG.  I couldn't see
anywhere where the summary uses the general programmability apparently
claimed.  Indeed I got the curious feeling that the first embodiment was a
rewrite of GIF89a and the second was a rewrite of MNG.

John Bowler <jbowler@...>


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[Glenn Randers-Pehrson]

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 3:34 PM, John Bowler <jbowler@...> wrote:
>>Patent 6,714,202 seems to extend or replace MNG somehow.

> Personally I find the patent incomprehensible.

Agreed.

> My general impression is
> that it looks like a simple rewrite of an early MNG spec.

> The invention claims to be simplifying the MNG spec.  However what it
>  *might* actually do (like I said, I find it incomprehensible) is to
> introduce a more complex control structure.  E.g. it might be dispensing
> with the MNG streamability in order to allow re-use of arbitrary image
> blocks.

It seems they are adding something like GOTO to MNG.  I guess they
did not read the SAVE chunk specification, which already provides
the capability of setting up an offset table to various portions of
the control structure (i.e., to the SEEK chunks).  There seems to me
to be nothing at all in the patent that isn't in MNG.

The SAVE offset table is described in the oldest MNG draft that I
have, which is version 0.95 of February 1998.

Glenn

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