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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

In other words, there's no source.

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

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