JPEG looks better to me. It's only a data point of 1, but it's the most important data point to me. ;)
"All patents that WG1 believes to be essential to practice JPEG 2000 Part 1 are available on ITU-T’s patent policy 2.1, which is fee-free (see the ITU-T web site for their interpretation of this)." http://www.jpeg.org/faq.phtml?action=show_answer&questio...
1) "Again, at every JPEG meeting the following resolution is also passed unanimously" appears to be saying each year they vote whether to continue or wether to reel in the bait. Tasty free morsels given by fisherman often turn out to have hooks attached.
2) It appears that one has to give up any patents that read on to a baseline spec for JPEG. This sounds like it could be bad for large multimedia companies who want to retain rights to an image format - what's the baseline. If the baseline is something like "uses huffman codes to compress image data" then this is going to be a potential huge cost in IPR given up.
These are possibly unfounded, just first thoughts at 2am.
Take for instance arithmetic coding option in original JPEG, the only patent-encumbered part of it. Just NOONE ever using it.