The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is reexamining a patent on image compression technology held by Forgent Networks, which has been earning much of its revenue from licensing the technology to software companies that want to use the JPEG picture format.
The move on Thursday to reexamine the patent held by Austin, Texas-based Forgent and its subsidiary, Compression Labs, originated in a request by the Public Patent Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit legal services organization that aims to expose patent abuses.
Patent rights have become a thorny issue, balancing the rights of companies and individuals who have spent time and money developing technology, as well as the rights of companies that acquire the patents and use lawyers to back them up, against the rights of companies to employ commonly used technology.