9
3
(US Patent 4,941,193)
I was surprised to read very general claims (in the beginning) which seems
to describe what I understand as "every kind of image compression which
would use the fixed-point theorem".
But at the end, the claims are so specific (as "restrictions" of the first
general claims) that I don't see any interest in them (they don't seem to
protect anything).
This process (general and then specific claims) seems very common, but as
I'm far from being an expert in patent reading, my questions are :
If I develop a (rather) new fractal compression scheme, will I be breaking
the general claims of this patent, or do I only need to be away from the
most specific ones ?
If (by chance) this new scheme could be patented, would I need to pay
royalties to the first patent owner each time I use mine ?
To explain my problem, I've been very surprised to see that, in the field of
arithmetic coding, two very close techniques (Q-coder and QM-coder if I
remember well) were patented seperately while the only difference between
them was a small constant value (not changing a lot the whole concept). And
the authors of the new patent seemed rather confident to be out of the range
of the previous patent...
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Alexandre
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