jp@Apple.COM (John Peterson) (03/17/90)
> I read in a magazine recently that some "questionable" (my quotes) > patents of Quantel's were recently upheld in (British?) court, despite > expert witness testimony from people like Jim Blinn. Does anybody have > more information on this? What exactly do Quantel's patents cover, and > will this affect any existing computer graphics software? There's an article on this in the March issue of Computer Graphics World (p. 15, "Spaceward Surrenders"). Basicly, Spaceward threw in the towel and gave in to Quantel's claim of patent infringement. Their parent company agreed to pay over $2.5M in damages, and cease all sales of the Spaceward "Matisse" paint system. The article goes on to say: However, finding other ways to create painting and image composition systems will be difficult at best, according to many experts. "If you do the obvious kind of soft-edge painting in the simplest way, it's likely to infringe the patents," says Prof. Robin Forrest of the University of East Anglia. Indeed, Forrest believes that the standard soft-edged image composition methods widely used in applications, from painting systems to to image retouching and page markup, appear to infringe the Quantel patents, as does the "alpha" channel often used for image blending.