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Will GIFs Be Free in 2003?
Ark42 asks: "Did the Unisys patent on LZW expire back on Dec 10, 2002? Does that mean we can all write GIF software royalty free now?
From what I can gather, Unisys only lists patent number 4,558,302 for covering LZW, which was filed on Jun 20, 1983 and issued on Dec 10, 1985. According to this site patents filed after Jun 7, 1995 last 20 years from the file date, and patents on or before then last 17 years from the issue date. That means the LZW patent expired on Dec 10, 2002. Am I missing anything?" A deadline of 2003 was given in this earlier Slashdot article. Assuming .GIFs can't follow in the footsteps of Mickey Mouse, will the popular image format now be "web safe"?
US Patent 4,558,302 was filed on the 20th June 1983. Under the laws at that time, it expires exactly 20 years after being filed.
fp.
Does my bum look big in this?
Okay, GIFs are good for cartoon-type images, but PNGs really are starting to become more common-place. Probably the only people who'll continue to use GIFs are those who were using them despite the patents and probably couldn't care less. Most people who were worried about the patents would have moved to some other format (probably PNG) and I doubt they'll see much of an incentive to move back.
Silly patent-holders on a widely-available image format. There are much more profitable things to be patented (human birth probably isn't patented, and with really good lawyers you could probably dismiss prior 'art' as pornography or something)
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
Provided they aren't .GIFs of Mickey Mouse!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
PNG.
Who gives a toss about GIF anymore?
If you've got a bunch of old GIFs sitting around that are worrying you, imagemagick to the rescue.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
It's in the name. G(NU)IF.
It would be very nice to openly use Gifs, especially considering the known issues when using transparent PNGs in IE.
Just use PNG. It's free, smaller, and does everything (except animation... see MNG) and more. Plus, we've finally reached a point where browsers are mature enough to support it. Even IE gets 8 bit PNG right.
According to ImageMagick's file formats page, the LZW patent expires in June 2003.
....but its been slow to take hold.
Why? App support and developer inertia.
Photoshop 7 still has crappy PNG support.
IE still doesn't support alpha right.
And web developers are still upset that PNG didn't include animation. To them, GIF is good enough, and nobody has hassled their site yet. Why should they change to something less compatible with less features?
GIF stands for GNU Is Free
GNU stands for GIFs Never Used
the cases IS, FREE, NEVER and USED are left as exercises for the motivated reader.
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
When June '03 rolls around, how could we get as many asses in .gif format presented to Unisys? Someone with a lot of bandwidth wanna register 'fuckuni.com' or 'unidinosaur.com' for this purpose?
Isn't it odd that the US government keeps extending copyright (now past 80 years), and patents are only valid for around 20 years? I mean, isn't it a lot more expensive to research a technology than it is to write a few pages of text?
Don't give them any ideas....
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
GNU/GIF
Is PNGOUT by Ken Silverman. Best kept PNG secret out there. It only works on Windows (console), but it almost always lets me squeeze a few more bytes out than PNGCrush.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
No, it has already expired. The original post is correct. Twenty years from application date is the law now. Before mid-1995 it was 17 years from issue. This thing is already dead.
:D
Ok, IANAL, but I am the holder of a patent applied for in 1994 and issued in 1996. I was VERY aware of the change in patent lifetime back then. This one is GONE.
It was one of the best motivators for technological improvement ever. PNG is better than GIF for almost *all* images except *extremely* small images, like those one-pixel spacers that people used to use.
Unfortunately, while PNG is now *used*, it still isn't as common as it should be.
May we never see th
Wow - thanks for mentioning this! I got it and did a little test:
38,247 trek-distance2.gif original GIF
56,857 trek-distance2-ps.png first PNG converted by Photoshop 7
34,276 trek-distance2-pc.png compressed with pngcrush
31,531 trek-distance2-po.png compressed with pngout
That's a pretty good compression even over pngcrush, much less over photoshop. Plus that pngcrush one was done with '-brute', to get the absolute best compression
it's capable of.
Not only that, but the pngout executable is less than 10% the size of the pngcrush executable. That's some sweet coding. He apparently uses Watcom C - I've asked the author for the source to see if I can get it to work with gcc. It's a console app, so if I can get it to work in gcc/win32 (I'm using Bloodshed's Dev-C++ package), then it should work pretty well with anything else, I'm hoping.
What IS it with Photoshop's crappy PNG compression? I'm using v7.0.1 (which, I must say, is way, WAY buggy.). *shrug*
What the hell kind of protocol is "fttps"? That's what fttps://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/15/1 528253&mode=nested&tid=123 (the last link in the story) specifies... which means the submitter either typed this out by hand (in which case, I feel sorry for them, do they not know about copy/paste?) or deliberately messed it up. (For what it's worth, the same URL with "https" as protocol does work. Although I do think https is a good idea and should be used more often, Slashdot browsing is probably one of the last things I'd worry about encrypting...)
I metamoderate all Redundant and Offtopic moderations as Unfair.
anyone can flagrantly disregard copyrights (in computer programs, at least) by clean-room reverse engineering and re-implementing your super-new compression algorithm from scratch in their own way and style. You can't do jack shit unless you show they actually stole your code (which they didn't, they only took a description of the idea that your code implements, and made their own implementation of that idea).
However, with patents, you have absolute ownership of ideas, not your implementations per-say. This gives you incredible control and allows you to wield incredible power. This allows you to control entire markets, rather than simply keep thieves at bay.
Nobody is really lobbying for longer patents because everyone recognises how much of a minefield they are. Even IBM and Microsoft have had to pay out huge amounts to patent-wielding shysters. Only pharmacutical companies want longer patents, because unlike the computer industry where you can sell your software the day you get your patent, pharmacuticals can't profit from their drug patents until they go through 20 years of drug approval tests.
Whereas with copyrights, there are many greedy media companies leaning on their increasingly aged laurels.
Does my bum look big in this?
Nope it doesn't, as I wrote in another post here, IE mangles PNG pictures a bit. And it doesn't support PNG alpha channel either.
only valid for 20 years.... Jesus, Copyright should be no more than 20years, hell I can't think of anything I done 10 years ago that you can't have for free[or last week for that matter]
patents no more than 5 if you can't establish a market for your idea in 5 years then someone else should be given the opportunity, and companies that just sit on patents are evil.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Wrong! See above. For patent filed before 6/8/95, the term length is the longer of 20 years from filing or 17 years from issue. In this case, one would use the 1983 filing date.