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Just because I make something that performs the same functions and has the same features as a proprietary application (ex XMMS vs Winamp), how am I violating intellectual property?

In many jurisdictions, you can easily step on a patent holder's toes (ex LAME vs Fraunhofer MP3 encoder) (ex GIMP vs Adobe ImageReady, w.r.t. GIF) (ex GIMP vs Photoshop Full Version, w.r.t. CMYK color space management).

I thought it was bad recently when a "Critical" IE6 security path completetly broke the ability to view TIFF images in a browser without hacking the registry by hand.

Actually, it was Microsoft dropping support for Netscape plug-ins such as QuickTime 5 because of a patent dispute.

I maintain a web site that basically sells access to TIFF imaged documents.

Adobe TIFF has three common lossless modes: Apple PackBits (RLE algorithm used in MacPaint and at least one NES game), CCITT Fax (a strange bilevel image codec used by fax machines), and Unisys LZW. PNG, on the other hand, uses Phil Katz's Deflate (LZSS on a 32 KB window, followed by Huffman coding), which makes smaller files than any of TIFF's three algorithms.

What does TIFF do that PNG doesn't?

nothing legally binds you to keep your word that the work is unencumbered by copyright restrictions

Except for language in the typical nearly-public-domain free software license. If Alice can't get a license from you, she can get a license from Bob: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of ... the Software to deal in the Software without restriction ... and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so" (emphasis by yerricde). The GNU GPL (a popular copyleft license for software) says it a different way: "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor". Unlike with a submarine patent, once this type of contract is in place, you can't just revoke the licenses at any time.

If I create a file format and want it to be adopted as a standard, I will make it public domain or else adopt a liberal licensing scheme.

And then, once you're the market leader, terminate all the royalty-free licenses.

Maybe file formats should be handled the same way [as patented pharmaceuticals]?

Actually, they are. Apple/Sorenson's video codec (used in .mov) is patented. Fraunhofer's MP3 audio codec (used in .mp3) is patented. Unisys's LZW still-image codec (used in .gif) is patented. Iterated Systems's fractal-transform still-image codec is patented.

700kbps ... = ... 70K/s. The 100K/s you might have seen is just a spike.

Here's an explanation for some spikes: Many datalink protocols include compression. For instance, PPP over v.90 includes a form of LZW compression called v.42bis. In addition, some protocols will compress data at the presentation/application level; many HTTP/1.1 servers can gzip content on the fly. All this adds up to more than 10 KB per second down on a v.90 dial-up connection when downloading the text of web pages.

Although jpg compression is definitely helpful, the article forgets to mention that two image formats are supported by all browsers. GIF being the second.

In addition, 4.0 and newer browsers support Portable Network Graphics (PNG).

GIFs should be used for vector based graphics

No they shouldn't. Use PNG for still images. Use SWF (now an open format) or MNG (not much browser support yet but works in Mozilla and Konqueror) for animations.

and provides a better overall quality/size advantage when done right.

PNG can be 10% smaller than GIF when crushed properly.

Yes, I thought it was common knowledge also. But I've noticed that there seems to be very little decrease in the use of GIF files in web sites. It seems like a majority of sites still use GIF's for their small images... tiled backgrounds, arrow pointers, etc. Besides not compressing the image as efficiently, GIF's also come with potential baggage, which is even more reason to choose JPEG over GIF. What's really goofy is, when I pointed my browser to that URL on tweaktown, a banner ad for Kingston memory appear... as a GIF!

The article may have been apropos on tweaktown, given that site's intended target audience. I *don't* think the article was apropos for /.

Xenix ... is now trapped somewhere and will return some day.

Some day is now. Xenix became SCO UnixWare became Open UNIX 8.

Funny quote on that page from Unisys: "Through it, our customers can jointly run Open UNIX 8 and Windows applications, giving them the flexibility of multiple platforms handling diverse responsibilities." Guess they left out the part about "such as using tools that support GIF for all your bitmap image processing needs."

If they weren't enough of an invention, they wouldn't be patentable, right?

Grandparent was referring to code, which is copyrighted far more often than it is patented. Under U.S. law, the term "invention" relates to patents, whereas copyrighted things are called "works."

Computer Code clearly falls under the auspices of Patent Law, and nothing further.

Parent (Score:-1, Opposes Slashdrone Position). We're supposed to be against software patents, remember? Burn All GIFs!

PNG really is better technically, and its use is becoming widespread. I wish it lick.

Yes, bandwidth is a huge problem for online comics. Unlike most types of content, comics exist as large, bandwidth-hogging image files. And when a cartoon site has a few years' worth of archived strips that people can look at, the GBs can really add up.

I don't pretend to know how to make money with online comics, but I can tell you that many webcomics could cut their bandwidth bills in half by optimizing their images:

1. Stop using GIFs! Fer crying out loud, use PNG images indexed to 256 or less colors. You don't have to worry about Unisys royalties or any such nonsense, and it compresses much more efficiently than GIF.

2. If you use PNG images, further compress them with pngcrush. It's free and doesn't degrade image quality at all.

3. If you use JPEG, use jpegoptim to optimize compression losslessly. The results may not be too dramatic, but every byte counts.

Drake Emko
http://hackles.org (nerdy animal fun!)

This is because corporations must protect their intellectual property otherwise it will be deemed to be in the public domain

Note that this applies only to the trademarks on "Star Wars," the movie titles, and the character names and likenesses. Copyrights on the expression of the movie and patents on the methods used to make the movie need not be defended as rigorously to maintain their validity; not pursuing infringers effectively amounts to granting an implicit license that can be pulled at any time.

GIF code (for encoding GIFs, not reading) is not free due to software patents. Further, GIF is in the process of being replaced by a free standard (PNG), which is also technilogicaly superior. For similar reasons, MP3 readers are perfectly safe because the MP3 patent only covers the encoding process.

Exactly how is this "hypocricy"? Debian says it's a project that upholds a certain set of Free Software guidelines, and then does so. They still allow non-free software, but it is seperated from the free stuff. It would be hypocritical to allow GIF encoding or LDP docuementation as a "special case". Now you may disagree with their unwavering stance on Free Software, but that is no basis for calling them hypocrits. Even so, I'm not sure that documentation should be held to the same standards as software.

(Personally, I started using Debian because of their stance with Free Software. I didn't even know what apt was until six months or so after I started using it.)

it also is a cross platform development platform. So it provides cross platform facilities for many activities - file access, sockets, database access

Just MySQL and PostgreSQL, or does it also talk to common proprietary DBMS such as oracle, sybase/mssql, etc?

printing, font handling, Unicode and internationalisation

How big does a distribution have to be to include glyphs for all 50,000 or so Unicode UCS-2 characters?

preference handling, XML support including SVG, various image formats

How much of the price of a Qt license covers the Unisys royalty for a popular "various image format"?

regexps, data and time classes, multimedia classes

Multimedia as in video playback? Is Qt trying to become like the other QT?

Does it handle press/release semantics for keypresses, or just press/repeat? Does it handle joysticks (erm, "industrial control devices")? Does it handle reading mouse motion not limited by the four walls of the screen (necessary for object manipulation in a 3D environment)? Does it handle sound?

Yes, I'm getting into the domain of Allegro or SDL, but only to show that Qt isn't the be-all and end-all of application toolkits.

I'm investigating which precisely patents are these (some of them have patent numbers, some don't).

One of these is U.S. Patent 4,558,302 on LZW compression that the V.42bis standard uses, owned by Unisys Corporation. Unisys's policy since mid-1999 has been not to license the LZW patent to free software projects.

requiring Compression adds a substanial amount of work

I don't think we're likely to see V.42bis compression support in free software for several years, as the V.42bis standard requires the use of patented LZW technology, and Unisys refuses to license LZW for use in free software. Feel glad that patents last only 20 years after filing and not forever like copyrights.

Hell, I once designed a custom lossless scheme for handling certain classes of bitmaps that beat lzw by a factor 5:1

It's easy to beat LZW on certain classes of bitmaps. For instance, LZW has a hard time with smooth gradations, whereas a lossless method with a good 2D predictor (like PNG's Paeth predictor plus zlib compression) will compress the image tighter because you get a lot of -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, and 3 in a roughly Laplacian (a*exp(-abs(b*x))) distribution. With the (lossless) compression settings cranked up to max (no gamma, no layer offset, no physical size, no comments, zlib level 9), an indexed PNG or MNG image beats the equivalent GIF on everything but really tiny images such as bullets and web bugs.

In fact, it's really easy to beat LZW on any image, even a 1x1 transparent GIF, as you could put much of the money you put toward royalties for U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts toward converting your images to PNG and buying more storage and bandwidth.

This is how I "encrypt" my email address to hide it from spam robots when posting on the web. To bad GIF and JPEG can't do 2d-block compression or the size could be kept pretty small.

PNG's interlace system amounts to compression on 2D blocks if you render the text in an 8x8 or 8x16 monospaced font.

the external server generates the corresponding GIF

Only if you're a big corporation, as GIF is patented.

Also you can prevent them from copying it to some degree

This also promotes bad netiquette by preventing them from quoting you in their replies.

LTSS 1.0 could support WAV, MP3

s/MP3/Ogg Vorbis/

GIF

s/GIF/PNG/ because PNG is better documented and supports 24-bit color and alpha transparency. You partially address this with

TIFF

but s/TIFF/PNG/ because even without TIFF's LZW codec, TIFF is much larger than PNG and not as well standardized.

Text/ASCII

Non-European language advocates would complain.

Text/Unicode

Better. Thank you. This solves the script issue, but in what natural language would information be stored? How is it a valid assumption that future generations can read format specs written in US English of A.D. 2001 or in UK English of A.D. 2001?

HTML version whatever

Make sure it's run through W3C's HTML Validator if you want to archive it. MSHTML is a Bad Thing.

and perhaps even Java for interpretation of abirtrary [sic] file formats.

The Java(TM) langauge does not have the wealth of alternative implementations that the C language has. Both are nearly Turing complete (full Turing completeness requires unbounded storage) and equally fast when compiled to a native instruction set.

They own the patent for that stupid GIF image format

No, that's Unisys. Verisign owns a monopoly (not court-enforced but MS-enforced) on trusted SSL and Authenticode certificates (having bought Thawte), even though VeriSign isn't doing a good job of checking its facts.

What ever happened to the ... royalty-free alternative to GIF?

It's called PNG now. Burn all GIFs; use PNG.

PNG support is uneven and broken, and few people even know about it.

Until they get sued.

Of course, you'd need to use this technique with a search engine who takes dead link submissions. Eg., Altavista and its "Add or Remove a Page" link

AltaVista does not allow submissions from visually impaired users or users of text-based web browsers such as Lynx, Links, or w3m. Its submission page uses a GIF image (burn all GIFs) to display rotated text in various fonts. The user is supposed to read the text and enter it into a field below. But visually impaired users, users on text browsers, and users on browsers whose developers have been cease-and-desisted by Unisys never see the GIF and cannot contribute links to AltaVista.

Of course, you'd need to use this technique with a search engine who takes dead link submissions. Eg., Altavista and its "Add or Remove a Page" link

AltaVista does not allow submissions from visually impaired users or users of text-based web browsers such as Lynx, Links, or w3m. Its submission page uses a GIF image (burn all GIFs) to display rotated text in various fonts. The user is supposed to read the text and enter it into a field below. But visually impaired users, users on text browsers, and users on browsers whose developers have been cease-and-desisted by Unisys never see the GIF and cannot contribute links to AltaVista.

Then you have the cgi return a single pixel gif.

And face a lawsuit from Unisys. But s/gif/png/ and you're fine; however, single-pixel PNGs are a bit bigger (byte-wise).

Anyway, what are you going to set as the alt="..." text (now a required attribute in <img> elements) for such a web bug? A more l33t way to do this would be to make your site logo a web bug; users wouldn't notice as much. This also sidesteps the "1-pixel PNGs are huge" problem.

12k GIF ... Perhaps we should report these guys to themselves (for infringing Terminal Reality's trademark)

I'd report you to copyright.net for posting a GIF, but copyright.net handles only copyrights, not patents (on GIF's LZW compression) or trademarks (on the Terminal Reality logo).

Unisys

Quit. Your. Job. Now.

In fact, this is exactly equivalent to the GIF trick

Not necessarily. There's a difference between trademarks and patents. Open*** can comply by simply changing its name to FreSH (free shell). (The same thing happened when The Tetris Company tried to sue Tetris cloners; the cloners simply changed the name of their products.) GIF writer developers have to completely abandon GIF, as LZW compression (a necessary and irreplaceable part of the GIF87 and GIF89 standard) is patented.

That's why we pay the estate of Alan Turing a percentage when we use a computer, or Alexander Graham Bell's descendants own the IP on the telephone.

Unlike copyrights, which are perpetual in the USA and WIPO states because DisneyCo owns Congress, patents expire 20 years after they're filed or 17 years after they're granted, but it doesn't matter because the USPTO takes three years to process a patent. And in those three years, a company (except for drug companies that also deal with FDA induced lag) can start selling the products and building a market. Because the patent is "pending," it's still not illegal to clone the product. But after the patent is granted, the company can "pull a Unisys" and make a killing in the courtroom.

You can't just wait until everyone in the world is using your stuff and suddenly spring on them and claim they all owe you money.

They're doing the exact same thing Unisys did. But doesn't Unisys have a patent on "submarine" patents?

anything that says UNDER CONSTRUCTION

What if the site is about something else that's under construction, such as a software package? What would a building construction company do?

clear 1X1 pixel gifs used for spacing with alt tags that say "spacer"

I agree here. Ditch the spacers except in Netscape 4.x which can't render CSS; even then, a spacer's alt tag should be alt=""

don't use javascript to display text

How do you generate dynamic content if you aren't paying big bux0r$$$ for access to a cgi-bin folder? The only way is through client-side EcmaScript or Java technology.

websites that play music

So are you saying that web-based interfaces to the Napster service are unacceptable? Sometimes, the music is the content, but I see your point when the music is there just for flashturbation[?].

websites that try to determine your browser type and give you messages about needing a different browser - deal with what I have. You're in no position to require me to do anything.

Even piece-of-crash Nutscrape 4.x?

more than one animated gif on a page

I agree here. Animation should be used with moderation; even then, it should be done using PNGs and EcmaScript (or MNGs in 6.0 browsers), not GIFs.

I'd like to add one more: right-click traps[?]. See also the Right-Click Trap Shit List.

It is possible to create content you know, you don't have to get it all from somewhere else

You miss the other points I was making:

1. They need to pay their staff to create the content.
2. The delivery system for animations is patented; LZW licenses are expensive.
3. Bandwidth costs money too.

Rubbish. Believe it or not the web extends beyond the borders of your country.

Wherever there's Disney, there's perpetual copyright. The Walt Disney Company buys puppet politicians in every major country and, every 20 years, lobbies for another 20-year extension to all subsisting copyrights.

But that's beside the point. The point I was trying to make was that web sites have to buy their content somewhere. Not only that, but they also have to pay Unisys for a license to display animated banner ads, as the patent-free alternative only works in recent Mozilla builds.

Well, what LizardTech's site says is:

>Download a 50-page color catalog in DjVu format
>in the time it takes to download a single page
>of that same catalog in PDF format.

So it looks like when they say "faster", they mean "smaller" (and thus faster to download).

BTW, I so much hope that if this goes anywhere, the format will be made open. (Fat chance :( ) Someone made a comparison on the BetaNews story with the problems with GIF; but that's not comparing like with like; we have a new format which requires a plug-in. It's more like pdf, only worse, because the viewers won't be as easily available.

It does, at least on my machine, but as I recall you have to specifically enable .gif support in QT when you compile it. I think they do this due to the patent issues with the compression in GIF's. While I, for one, only use PNG's any more, the ubiquity of GIF's makes lack of support for them a pain. I can't wait until 2003 when the ridiculous patent expires and I can look at the any GIF's still on the web without dealing with the complications brought about by the patents.

Other than that, and A)not-quite-ready javascript support (including especially that it doesn't yet support "javascript:" style URLs) and B)an occasional annoying "won't let go of the current site no matter what address you type in" bug, Konqueror so far seems really nice. It's fast and seems to render nearly everything well. I use it for about 80% of my browsing now - I suspect when a few bugs are fixed by the KDE 2.0.1 release that number will be up to 90-95%...I figure within 4-6 months I'll be able to dump Netscape entirely. If not, maybe the Mozilla branch will be ready for 'prime time' by then.

Actually, using anything with straight LZW compression, like PKZIP, is a bad idea.

The .zip and .tgz formats use Deflate (LZSS + Huffman), not LZW. If the .zip format used LZW (it did in PKZIP's early years), then Unisys would be all over the Info-ZIP project.

Now, to "LZ-type algorithms are a bad idea on floppies because errors are not recoverable": I'll give you that one.

(b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters

The free software community's standard for delivering sexy images is PNG or JPEG, not GIF. GIF is "patently offensive" (U.S. Patent 4,558,302) to the free software community.

This is like boycotting JPeGs

No, it's more like boycotting GIFs. MP3 is patented.

Don't use GIF. Use a small PNG file instead (provided you have a 4.0 or later browser).
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

You might be interested in Mike Schinkel's "Notes on how to configure IIS for PNG". (It's a zipped Microsoft Word document but those of you with Microsoft IIS probably have Microsoft Word too.)

So, it's not like ESR just got invited out of the blue to join the PTO advisory board. It took a lot of work from Open Source and Web freedom advocates.

Check out especially this page on BurnAllGifs.org and this article on Pigdog Journal. Cool groups like RTMark also got into the fight.

Of course, this story was submitted several times to Slashdot -- BEFORE the nominations process was over -- but apparently it wasn't important enough then to cover. And now that it's a done deal, it's covered here like it was an effortless thing.

Too bad Slashdot is doing such a bad job covering the important movements that are changing the face of the Internet. Just remember: for every rotten turn of events you read about on Slashdot, there's a group of dedicated people somewhere working to fight it. Too bad /. can't help you find them and work for freedom, too.

But [you] can count the number of sites that actually use [PNG images] on one hand, can't you?

For a set to be counted on one standard human hand, there must be thirty-one or fewer elements (all five fingers up = binary 11111 = 31). Here's a short list; can you think of more?

1. Pinocchio's Brother and redpinocchio (my homepage)
2. Every other site I've designed (can't name them; confidentiality)
3. PNG headquarters
4. League for Programming Freedom
5. Burn All GIFs Day
6. Campaign for Real Ale
7. AuctionBeagle
8. University of Puerto Ricto Institute of Neurobiology
9. Eressea Fantasy PBEM
10. several clip art sites (here or here)

Ogg Vorbis is an unencumbered audio compression format with a reference library under Lesser GPL. The format is frozen; when 1.0 comes out, we can Burn All MP3s (the domain is available) like we burned all GIFs.

OggVorbis (.ogg) is to MPEG Audio Layer 3 (.mp3) as Deflation (.png) is to LZW (.gif).

There was a protest when Unisys laid the smack-down on free use of LZW compression in GIF. If the League for Programming Freedom wants to get involved, burnallmp3s. org is available.

Perhaps browsers should allow for html.Z

Please, please not .Z. The .Z format is the GIF of file compression: it's encumbered by U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts.

or some sort of standardized compression format

Ahhh, that's better. Use .gz, which is the format that XML systems are beginning to output anyway (Gnumeric spreadsheets are gzipped XML files). Did you know that some FTP servers support dynamic gzipping and un-gzipping?

browse a few of the patent documents ... converted them to gifs

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black; the compression behind GIF itself is patented. On the other hand, had you said PNG images...