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"?

Comments

So what?

[kruetz]

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)

Re:So what?

[kyz]

You're forgetting that it's the LZW compression algorithm that's patented, not the GIF image format or the images per-say.

And, when you look at it, LZW is actually quite a nice algorithm to use. It offers incredibly high speed compression and decompression, but performs better than run-length encoding. In case you hadn't noticed, many computer games use decompressed-on-the-fly graphics in their games. While it's no use for video and audio compression compared to lossy algorithims, patent-free LZW would be useful to game developers as it could improve on their often abysmal realtime compression/decompression. Many game houses are still using RLE compression. Personally, I'd recommend LZO rather than LZW, but that's just me.

Re:So what?

[McCarrum]

Why remove choice? GIF's are just fine, as are PNG. For those of us who are FORCED (for whatever valid and/or stupid reason) to support non-PNG browsers, GIFs are still the best choice.

IMHO, PNG *is* the way to go. However, this does not rule out GIF automatically.

A bit tangential, but...

[ajuda]

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?

Re:A bit tangential, but...

[Smidge204]

Yes, of course, BUT...

A patent is 'hard'. That is, the form of the invention is concrete and not open to much interpretation. Either it's the same technology or it isn't. A creative person will always find a way to do the same thing in another (possibly better?) way. This makes patents useless in the long run, from the standpoint of a money grubbing board of executives.

A copyright, on the other hand, is very subjective. If another company comes out with a black-colored cartoon mouse character (please don't interpret that as a racist remark!), Disney could take them to court and argue for years about how they 'stole' Mickey's design and how they're trying to use their character's popularity to 'confuse' people and make a profit. There's a lot of room for legal bullshit here, with the company who can afford to keep the laywers on retainer the longest coming out on top... ...hence, trying to preserve a copyright indefinately is likely to be a finantially worthwhile endevour!
=Smidge=