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There are no royalties to be paid on JPEG XL. Nobody but Cloudinary and Google is claiming to hold relevant patents, and Cloudinary and Google have provided a royalty free license. Of course the way the patent system works, anything less than 20 years old is theoretically risky. But so far, there is nobody claiming royalties need to be paid on JPEG XL, so it is similar to WebP in that regard.

"Patent issues" has become a (sometimes truthful) excuse for not doing something.

When the big boys want to do something, they find a way to get it done, patents or no, especially if there's only "fear of patents" - see Apple and the whole watch fiasco.

Patents was not the latest excuse I heard from Google. Their explanation was security concerns.

Do you have a link? Or was it a private communication?

> [...] other large companies that would be exposed to law suits related to these patents (Apple, Adobe, etc.) [...]

Adobe included JPEG XL support to their products and also the DNG specification. So that argument is pretty much dead, no?

Adobe also has an order of magnitude lower number of installed software than Chrome or Firefox which makes patent fees much cheaper. And their software is actually paid for by users.

DNG Converter (which includes JPEG XL compression) isn’t paid. You can get it here: https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter...

Not that simple. Maybe they struck a deal with a few of the companies or they made a different risk calculation. And of course they have a pretty fierce patent portfolio themselves so there's the notion of them being able to retaliate in kind to some of these companies.

I don't think that's true (see my other comment for what the patent is really about), but even when it is, Adobe's adoption means that JPEG XL is worth the supposed "risk". And Google does ship a lot of technologies that are clearly patent-encumbered. If the patent is the main concern, they could have answered so because there are enough people wondering about the patent status, but the Chrome team's main reason against JPEG XL was quite different.

Adobe sells paid products and can carve out a license fee for that, like they do with all the other codecs and libraries they bundle. That's part of the price you are paying.

Harder to do for users of Chrome.

The same thing can be said with many patent-encumbered video codecs which Chrome does support nevertheless. That alone can't be a major deciding factor, especially given that the rate of JPEG XL adoption has been remarkably faster than any recent media format.

Is this not simply a risk vs reward calculation? Newer video codecs present a very notable bandwidth saving over old ones. JPEG XL presents minor benefits over WebP, AVIF, etc. So while the dangers are the same for both the calculation is different.

Video = billions lower costs for Youtube.

You can get Adobe DNG Converter for free and use it to convert your raw files to DNG compressed with JPEG XL.

https://helpx.adobe.com/content/dam/help/en/camera-raw/digit...

The Microsoft patent doesn't apply to JXL, and in any case, Microsoft has literally already affirmed that they will not use it to go after any open codec.

How exactly is that done? I assume even an offhand comment by an official (like CEO, etc) that is not immediately walked back would at least protect people from damages associated with willful infringement.

That ANS patent supposedly relates to refining the coding tables based on symbols being decided.

It is slower for decoding and Jpeg xl does not do that for decoding speed reasons.

The specification doesn't allow it. All coding tables need to be in final form.

> their lawyers pulled the emergency brakes

Do you have source for that claim?

Probably this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/

I think it would be much better for everyone involved and humanity if Mr. Duda himself got the patent in the first place instead of praying no one else will.

Duda published his ideas, that’s supposed to be it.

Prior art makes patents invalid anyway.

Absolutely.

And nothing advances your career quite like getting your employer into a multi-year legal battle and spending a few million on legal fees, to make some images 20% smaller and 100% less compatible.

Well, lots of things other than JXL use ANS. If someone starts trying to claim ANS, you'll have Apple, Disney, Facebook, and more, on your side :)

But that doesn't matter. If a patent is granted, choosing to infringe on it is risky, even if you believe you could make a solid argument that it's invalid given enough lawyer hours.

The Microsoft patent is for an "improvement" that I don't believe anyone is using, but Internet commentators seem to think it applies to ANS in general for some reason.

A few years earlier, Google was granted a patent for ANS in general, which made people very angry. Fortunately they never did anything with it.

I believe that Google's patent application dealt with interleaving non-compressed and ANS data in a manner that made streaming coding easy and fast in software, not a general ANS patent. I didn't read it but discussed shortly about it with a capable engineer who had.

If the patent doesn't apply to JXL then that's a different story, then it doesn't matter whether it's valid or not.

...

The fact that Google does have a patent which covers JXL is worrying though. So JXL is patent encumbered after all.

I misrecalled. While the Google patent is a lot more general than the Microsoft one, it doesn't apply to most uses of ANS.

I'm just inferring from the fact that MS got a patent and then this whole thing ground to a halt.

Not only you have no source backing your claim, but there is a glaring counterexample. Chromium's experimental JPEG XL support carried an expiry milestone, which was delayed multiple times and it was bumped last time on June 2022 [1] before the final removal on October, which was months later the patent was granted!

[1] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40168998#comment52

In other words, there's no source.

>To fix this, you'd need to convince Google, and other large companies that would be exposed to law suits related to these patents (Apple, Adobe, etc.), that these patent holders are not going to insist on being compensated.

Apple has implemented JPEG XL support in macOS and iOS. Adobe has also implemented support for JPEG XL in their products.

Also, if patents were the reason Google removed JXL from Chrome, why would they make up technical reasons for doing so?

Please don't present unsourced conspiracy theories as if they were confirmed facts.

Safari supports jxl since version 17