What is the patent situation with JBIG?
There is a difference between the (patented) arithmetic coders used in JBIG and the later JBIG2 standards. JBIG uses the QM-Coder and JBIG2 uses MQ-Coder. They are not technically the same. It is believed that patents for the QM-Coder are owned by three organaizations (IBM, Mitsubishi, and Lucent) and patents for the MQ-Coder are owned by two organizations (IBM and Mitsubishi) . Free licenses should be available for MQ-Coder (used in JBIG2 and JPEG2000) although a license should still be requested, but one-time payments to three organizations are necessary for QM-Coder (used in JBIG and JPEG-Arithmetic). At one stage these were of the order of a single one time license fee of 5000 US$, but the relevant companies should be contacted for their current pricing. If these have changed substantially, we would appreciate it if you could inform the webmaster so that the site can be updated accordingly. Our understanding is that the license conditions of these coders are limited to the case whe
