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

Expires on 20th June 2003.

[kyz]

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.

Re:Expires on 20th June 2003.

[Groote Ka]

The original posting is correct, indeed. What needs to be added is that for patents issued after June (?) 1995, but filed prior to that, you may choose between 20 years after filing or 17 years from grant.

User -kyz is confused by the patent law everywhere else in the world, where a patent lasts up to 20 years from filing.

With the change of patent law in 1995 by the US, they finally decided to harmonise patent terms with the rest of the world.

A small step for a human, but a giant leap for such a conservative country.

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.

Re:So what?

[kyz]

bzip and rar are both high-performance archivers. They're not intended to work at any high speed. LZW is a high speed algorithm intended to compress quickly rather than compress well. LZO is also a high-speed algorithm, but it compresses slightly better than LZW, and the decompression speed of LZO is far faster than LZW.

bzip2 (note the 2) uses simply burrows-wheeler block sorting with move to front compression, with huffman as the entropy encoder. It will remain like that forever, and not introduce any more compression algorithms. In fact, bzip (version 1, before bzip2) used arithmetic coding instead of huffman, so it actually produced better compression, but IBM et al have a bunch of patents on arithmetic coding, so bzip2 will never use them until they expire. Block-sorting is a "clever trick" to LZ compression, but it doesn't "scale", i.e. you can't put a better predictive model into it and get better compression, the best you can do is put a better sort algorithm in, and we all know that sorting is pretty much at the limits already. RAR on the other hand uses a whole load of algorithms, including Dmitry Shkarin's PPMII which is a statistical compressor that outperforms pretty much anything (at the cost of being very slow). It also has a range of "multimedia" filters, i.e. special processing for images, audio and executables that make the data easier to compress when the real compression is used. RAR isn't open source. If you want something that stands up to it that is open-source, check out 7-zip. bzip2 is not going to get better any time soon.

Let's hope so,

[pb]

Provided they aren't .GIFs of Mickey Mouse!

June 2003

[\\]

According to ImageMagick's file formats page, the LZW patent expires in June 2003.

GIF

[kruetz]

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.

Unisys Mooning Day!

[mcgroarty]

I'd like to propose the idea of a mass Unisys mooning day to show the old dinosaur what we think of obvious patent abuse.

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?

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=

Shhhhhhh.....

[chriso11]

Don't give them any ideas....

Re:Gifs want to be free

[damiam]

IE supports just as much transparency for PNG as it does for GIF. It's just that it was designed for GIF's, which only use one level of transparency, so it can't handle PNG's extra levels. It's quite easy, however, to create a PNG with one-bit transparency, and such a PNG would be superior to a similar GIF in every way.

Even better than pngcrush

[friedegg]

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.