Contact:	Bob Nelson						For immediate release
		(212) 854-5573					July 1, 1997
		rjn2@columbia.edu


Justice Department Approves Digital TV Patent Pool;
Columbia, Only University In Group, To Receive Fees


	Columbia University, the only academic institution in the patent pool
 created to license the MPEG-2 digital video compression standard, expects to 
begin receiving license fees from the technology as early as this year.
	Columbia and eight companies together hold 33 patents that now
comprise MPEG-2, which allows the transmission of high-quality video and audio signals 
over limited bandwidth.  Dimitris Anastassiou, professor of electrical engineering 
at Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science and director of the 
Columbia New Media Technology Center, developed one of the MPEG-2 
compression technologies with one of his graduate students.
	On June 26, antitrust lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice for the first 
time approved an arrangement under which all related patents for a single 
innovation - MPEG-2 -  would be licensed under the direction of a single 
administrator.  Under the agreement, firms that wish to manufacture electronic 
equipment that stores or transmits compressed video data will seek a single 
license from a Denver company, MPEG Licensing Administrator, or MPEG LA, 
to be jointly owned by the patent holders.  
	MPEG LA is expected to begin seeking licensing fees from companies that 
already use MPEG-2 in their products.  Worldwide sales of digital video products 
over the next decade are expected to range in the billions of dollars.
	"We believe the patent pool approach offers Columbia an excellent 
opportunity to receive significant royalty payments over the next few years," said
Jack Granowitz, executive director of the Columbia Innovation Enterprise (CIE), 
the University's technology licensing office.  Mr. Granowitz, along with Fred 
Kant, director of the CIE, helped formulate the patent pool in meetings with the 
other patent holders that took place over the last three years.
	A portion of the licensing fees from Columbia innovations is channeled into 
a Strategic Research Fund administered by the Office of the Vice Provost.  The 
income is used to back promising new research from Columbia laboratories that 
has the potential to save lives or provide other benefits to consumers.
	MPEG-2 technology is already widely in use in all forms of digital video 
transmission, including digital television, direct broadcast by satellite, digital
 cable systems, personal computer video, digital video disk (DVD), compact disks 
and various interactive media.  The technology eliminates redundant 
information, such as backgrounds that do not change, reducing the amount of 
data storage or transmission required to reproduce video sequences.
	"Our aim was to develop sophisticated algorithms that would achieve as 
much compression as possible, with as little loss of quality as possible, and with 
as little computational burden as possible," Professor Anastassiou said.
	Acting Assistant Attorney General Joel I. Klein said in a business review 
letter that the licensing program was well designed to capture all the efficiencies
 that can come from joint licensing of complementary technologies.  Under the 
department's business review procedure, an organization may submit a proposed 
action to the antitrust division and receive a statement as to whether the division 
will challenge the action under the antitrust laws.
	The eight companies are Fujitsu Ltd., General Instrument Corp., Lucent 
Technologies, Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., 
Philips Electronics N.V., Scientific-Atlanta Inc. and Sony Corp.  MPEG stands for 
the Motion Picture Expert Group, an international organization created in 1988 to 
design technical standards for video compression.

This document is available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/.  Working press may receive 
science and technology press releases via e-mail by sending a message to rjn2@columbia.edu.

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