It looks like Forgent’s long run of JPEG lawsuit revenue has now officially dried up. The Austin American Statesman has an article (registration required) that says the remaining JPEG lawsuits have all been settled, with a grand total of less than $8 million from somewhere fewer than 20 defendents.

Apparently, the whole JPEG lawsuit run that Forgent was on must have racked up a lot of bad karma for the company. Although they collected over $100 million over a few years, they had to spend over half of that on legal fees, and while that was going on, they seem to have taken their eye off the ball and forgotten about developing new products and business. Their low stock price has generated a delisting warning from the NASDAQ, and to top it off, a digital video patent they had high hopes for appears to have been invalidated as well.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up on Forgent’s activities, the company has been generating fairly large sums of money since 2002 by suing users of JPEG technology, starting with camera companies and moving on to computer manufacturers, web publishers, and so on. It all came to an end this year with the patent office invalidated key portions of the patent. A good recap can be found in this Wikipedia article.