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GIF Patent Prepares to Expire
pajamacore writes "It's worth noting that 20 June 2003 is GIF Liberation Day, the day on which US Patent 4,558,302 expires. The patent describes the LZW compression algorithm used in .gif files. That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys."
That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys.
Or maybe they'll figure that the vast majority of their customers won't know and they'll pocket the savings.
About time, talk about a legacy format.
That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys.
Ha! Hahaha. Like they'll drop their prices...
I bet your typical photoshop user has no idea that GIFs are patented. Which means Adobe will feel no pressure whatsoever to lower prices. Besides, people will still pay $500 for photoshop. And the price drop would be what? maybe $20 max?
neurostarWhat's the purpose? It's not like you can make money off it.
Film at 11.
I don't think you'll be getting lower prices on software products because there is no longer a patent on LZW. I believe it's like $5000 to get a license for a single product. A pretty hefty fee, but that means nothing to someone like Adobe.
past the end of contract expiration in order to agree to license LZW?
This is my sig.
GD will generate GIFs? Yeehah!
--------
Free your mind.
you mean kinda the same way that airline tickets drop when fuel prices drop? or the way phone services prices drop when govt. fees are removed? or perhaps you mean the way that cable tv prices dropped when they were deregulated and subject to 'free market' competition? /sarcasm/
As noted on the GD website, the patent doesn't expire internationally until July 7th of next year.
Hey, I can stop pirating apps then!
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
...what's going to happen to PNG?
Patents in other countries like Canada and Japan last through next year. And, PNG is technically superior to GIF even without the patent issue.
Tell Taco you want PNG8 on Slashdot (which 99.9% of browsers can handle just fine!)
LZW Patent Expires...
JPGs at Eleven.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
though I can't recall the last time I actually used a .gif file (I think it was for a website that I coded a few years back... clipart or some such)
OK... now can we do the same thing for some of the AV codecs?
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
We used their LZW compression algorithm in our product (for compressing product update files). It compresses text quite well for very little code. I asked Unisys what the fees would be for the use of this and it was US $2000! As a result we don't have that compression option in countries that have this patent.
Stuff paying $2000 for something that can be represnted by less than 30 lines of code.
I think, in the spirit of Orrin Hatch, and the undead zombies of the RIAA, that this patent should be extended indefinitely and every asshole with an unauthorized GIF on his or her PC deserves to get their fucking hard drive wiped by the God-like police-power-holding can-do-no-wrong patent-holders.
Sometimes I hate this country. Then I look at China and laugh.
Think how much better linux will be with cheaper software that supports .gifs
The MacGIMP site is getting ready to release a GIF-enabled build of the GIMP at midnight.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys
Ahh what I wouldn't give to be young and naive again...
NO CARRIER
...I want to know when .TXT expires. ;)
The coolest voice ever.
Kevin Mitchell's , one of the first GIF-manipulating products for Mac, is still available as shareware.
He's still dedicated Mac only, so he could use your support.
Design for Use, not Construction!
..that some poor schmuck web designer is about to get sacked.
:)
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
Note, this only applies to the patent in the US.
License Information on GIF and Other LZW-based Technologies
"After expiration of the U.S. LZW patent on June 20, 2003, liability for patent infringement will occur only if an infringing act with respect to a product or service (e.g., developing, selling, offering to sell, making, using, distributing, downloading, exporting and/or importing) occurs in a country where the LZW patent has not expired.
Since each country has its own patent laws and rules regarding what constitutes patent infringement, effected persons may wish to seek advice from their own legal counsel."
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
As seen on the Kuro5hin article, there are still patents in other countries (Japan, Canada, England, etc.) that don't expire until next year.
One day we will see a thread without a theory about how "M$" is going to use this new development to fuck us all.
One day, man.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Maybe, now that it's patent-unencumbered, we can convince to use this technology. :)
I'd be happy if people could just pronounce it. Do you seriously say Jraphics Interchange Format?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Ummmm... are you in the right discussion???
RSA at least had the decency to put their algorithm into the public domain a month before it was scheduled to automatically get there.
.. they've already milked all the cash they can from the corps.
Unisys is a) out of touch with reality b) greedy.
Unisys needs to quit squatting on GIFs and realize that nobody is going to pay them anyway. how much really could they be making of GIF's !?
Are there companies still stupid enough to pay them the one time $5k
Somebody write to them and ask them if they would voluntarily release GIF into the public domain. Spell out the reasons as to why it would make them look like a halfwau dcecent company. I cant do it without being expletive.
I'd pay for a Slashdot subscription if Slashdot switched to PNGs because then I'd see they were bandwidth/cost concious.
Yay. Now I can write useless gif utilities without paying those hefty fees ($1500 was it?). One idea would be to break an image into 16x16 tiles, reduce each to 16 colors or less, and piece them together as an animated gif to create a lossy gif for photos that are smaller than 256 color gifs and can break the 256 color barrier. Sure, you can't do much with it that you can't get from using better formats like png, but notice that I said useless.
They really got a lot out of LZW. Such widespread use, while still earning them lots of money.
You see, they can't buy the license. The patent expires. Unlike copyrights, patent terms are very limited and nonrenewable.
GIF is such an old format, it's a wonder anyone even remembers what it is. Its utility was long ago surpassed by JPG and then PNG.
Loading...
found in google cache
License Information on GIF
"The U.S. LZW patent expires June 20, 2003, the counterpart Canadian patent expires July 7, 2004, the counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expire June 18, 2004, and the Japanese counterpart patents expire June 20, 2004. "
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
I'm well into the afternoon on the 20th of june ;)
...
Its a good thing, too, cuz its the start of the weekend, yay! Can't wait to knock off work.
Oh yeah. I'm in Australia
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I haven't used gifs in years, mainly just jpgs if I touch anything web-related. So my question is, does every browser out there accept the PNG format? I wouldn't mind doing indexed-color images if I need to (I think this is doable within PNG), but I'm a little naive about PNG on the interweb. And how are file-size comparisons?
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
OK, when a patent expires, the whole point of that is that there now is no longer any license to buy. The intellectual rights have passed into the public domain; they can no longer be any one entities property.
Not one day we will see "M$" not try to fuck us all by any means possible.
Not one day, man.
Nice try. Too bad they can't. heh retarded M$ weenie. Go back to wearing your tin foil hat :)
The Canadian patent expires on the 6th of June, 2004, the European on the 18th of June, 2004, and the Japanese on the 20th of June, 2004.
Don't start partying until it's expired everywhere - you still need a patent license to create your .Z archives and compressed GIFs in these areas.
I'll still use PNG.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
In 1995, I worked for a website called Pathfinder. About half the staff pronounced it GIF, the other half JIF.
:)
Since we had good ties with CompuServe, the folks that invented/popularized the format, we figured that they'd know the answer. We actually called. And has per the title, the preferred way of pronouncing it is "JIF".
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed
So what free GIF animation programs are due out on June 21? It's fun to play around with animations, I just always hated how these programs always had to have an expiration date. I wonder how many more GIF's we'll see all over the web in the coming months.
You disagree? Hey, I'm just quoting the inventors of the format. Here's the evidence:
* CompuServe used to distribute a graphics display program called CompuShow. In the documentation for version 8.33 in the FAQ section, it states:There, straight from the inventors of the format. Convinced yet?
Well maybe this. But thats about it. Of course this assumes people would actually buy that POS.
For a good laugh look under the old 2001 slashdot article about the first of the series. You can find it on google.
The original site from "escape from Unix to Windows" was run on FreeBSD. The ad itself is controversial but the fact that it was later running Unix was funny as hell.
Poor old Unisys.
http://saveie6.com/
The posting of dups on Slashdot is still not patented and free for all to do.
Future of PNG
GIF is a lossless format, unlike jpg.
You dont see many company logos in jpg format.
I don't know why png has not been embraced. Probably has something to do with the web's history of browser incompatibility, etc.
Web designers are trained to design for the lowest common denominator.
I got a recent bid for a website that requires the website to be version 3 compatible.
While its now safe to say we can drop version 3 support, the conception is we still need to support it. After all there are still 486's out there in service (public libraries, non-profits, etc.).
Scary as it is, there is still a sizeable percentage of web users using version 4 browsers.
Actually, they've already incorporated ZIP technology into Windows XP.
Great, Linux is better than Windows 95!
Whoop-de-freakin'-do!
the problem there is that people with a brain don't use Linux.
Maybe now I can stop stealing WinZip!
I mean it is like patenting a method of fitting matches into a matchbox!
How techincally advanced is it to say 12 greenish dots now 14 reddish dots etc.
Just plain dumb really - infantile technology compared to JPG.
It does one thing really well though - i use Tiffs a lot and it really does decrease the size of most tiffs - but that doesnt make it great technology.
Never mind that dumb .gif format, when does the .exe patent expire?
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
Don't count your chickens while congress is still in session. You may wake up on the 20th to find that the patent expires sometime in 3003. Of course congress doesn't have to act tonight, the extended (c) after the use by date.
To heck with FP, I think I will just make the first /. post on GLD. It is now 12:00 EDT 6-20-03.
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
Even though much of the world has moved on, patent-free LZW will shine one last time by compressing Unisys' asset column by a near-infinite factor!
It would be if IE supported PNG correctly.
No longer must we be deprived of 256 color paletted graphics with inferior lossless compession! Now we can experience the finest in 1980s(?) image technology!
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
IE does not support backasswards formats with no real advantage over GIF.
I've been actively following the progress of Nuvie (http://nuvie.sourceforge.net), which is an emulator to run Ultima 6 on newer computers - many of the files used LZW compression to compress the data - this was back in the days of floppys, where disk space was at a premium. The fact that the LZW patent is expiring will be a blessing for them and other such projects - they won't need to tiptoe around worrying whether they're violating the patent anymore.
I'll always remember GIF for introducing me to a huge underground world of BBS porn when I was a kid.
I used to string a 50ft telephone cord from my family's computer into the nearest phone jack (in the kitchen) every night and download GIFs over zmodem at 2400baud. It's a wonder I could stay awake in school.
Since the day we upgraded from CGA to VGA (256 color!) graphics, I've been a sick sick puppy.
Thank you, GIF! You made it all possible.
Mozilla is dropping MNG support, so what will you use for animated images?
heh heh heh
Keep in mind that most slashdot readers consider masturbation to be a drop-in vagina "replacement".
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
... considering my comment from yesterday.
Someone said that 20 years is a long time in software, and not many technologies would still be in use by the time the patent expired.
I said what about unix, and someone replied that unix is the exception. Now it looks like GIF is the other exception.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
I'm curious if anyone knows whether the IBM patent has also expired? Or if not, when it is set to expire - that's the one thing I haven't been able to find out. I'm not familiar with patent law, so I don't know whether the patent period is fixed or variable.
Even if it is now expired, it would probably be of benefit for somewhat more familiar with the two patents to discuss the differences between them. I'm sure other Slashdotters would be interested to find out.
I compress things by typing carelessly, or using acronyms.
K?
lol.
I don't want to be here.
Way back in the day, there was a company called Wang. Wang made terminals and stuff for the old mainframes, they also invented and patented the Single Inline Memory Module, or SIMM memory and the SIMM slot. Yes, they were the ones that thought of putting memory on a stick and plugging it into the motherboard. Prior to that, all the computer memory came soldered onto the motherboard. So, if you bought memory back in the day when it cost $45/meg, $1 of that was going to Wang. Wang was making huge bucks off their patent. It was their cash cow. Then the patent expired... Their cash cow quit giving milk, and they shriveled up. They got bought for a song in January 1999 by a company called Getronics. I guess thats what happens when you fail to innovate. I wonder what'll happen to Unisys...?
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
...choose .GIF
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
I would love PNG to take off, but if IE support isn't there, its DOA.
Web sites offering legal information (DISCLAIMER: which is not the same as legal advice) disagree. This page claims: "It is always permissible to use a patented invention for research purposes," but this page denies the existence of such an exception to the patent monopoly.
Any lawyers in the audience?
Will I retire or break 10K?
IE also doesn't support such crack addict features such as stability, and security.
Oh, right, tabbed browsing is for terrorists. Pop up ad blocking? Those companies need to make their money too!
GO GATOR!
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
Prove that Canadian law does not allow a patent on "a computing device, with means for memory, input, and output, programmed to perform the following steps: (description of LZW follows)".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
And don't forget:
20 June 2003: The LZW patent expires today in the United States. However, patents on LZW are still in force in other countries. Please continue to refrain from using GIFs. More importantly, do not allow your communications to be censored by the whims of patent holders. Things you can do: Sign the petition: Burn all GIF's.
Quack, quack.
Flash. Hell, if Homestarrunner.net (dot com!) doesn't need MNGs, then neither do I.
Your concerns about backwards compatibility are valid, but its not as bad as you portray.
No, they try and fail to support it properly. Alpha blending doesn't work without a god-awful hack in the HTML.
but gif is so much better because you can do the compression calculations with a pen and paper! i'd like to see you do that with worthless PNG!
YOU SUCK BALLS!
so is there any de-facto standard for adding simple animations to PNG?
Yes, and it's called MNG. KHTML (Konqueror and Safari) supports it. Mozilla 1.0 through 1.4 supports it. Though it has been removed from the Mozilla trunk, it'll go back in (b.m.o bug 18574) as soon as Glenn gets done reducing its code footprint. Plug-ins are available for Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
If you consider MNG a bloated disaster, take a look at MNG-LC, which is smaller.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You're just jealous you didn't write that code? :)
The use of the GIF format can be done currently without any patent issues, as long as you use the less-compressing RLE format. RLE isn't patented, so it's a semi-decent format to use if you absolutely require GIF images.
More information, with an interesting Unisys story as well, can be found at http://www.serverobjects.com/lzw.html.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I wonder if Unisys could get a copyright on LZW code and thereby own it for another few centuries.
Copyright cannot cover a process. It may cover the LZW code libraries that Unisys may sell, but it does not cover independent implementations of the process.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"Prior art" is exactly why the European and Japanese patents expire almost one year to the day after the U.S. patent does. After filing for a patent in the States, the inventor must file abroad within 365 days or loses the right to file abroad at all.
No, I don't know why Canada is an exception.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The holder of a patent in an invention has the right to prevent anybody from making, using, offering to sell, or selling the patented invention.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you can spare some bandwidth, please drop by macgimp.org to offer a mirror for the MacGIMP update. It is a 52 megabyte file.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
I'm in Australia ...
If Australian patent law is anything like European patent law, an inventor who has filed for a patent on an invention outside Australia has 365 days to file in Australia. I wouldn't suggest celebrating for another year.
Will I retire or break 10K?
...why, M$ is sure to make MNG support one of its top priorities!
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
I had a similar experience with ASCII art and a 300 baud modem...
How are they going to enforce the possibility of users downloading from our fast American servers? An unenforceable law is not a law. The same thing problem occurred when Finnish and Swedish ftp servers had the gif encoding libraries available. I don't think that it is patent law that needs to be reworked, but rather, how intellectual property as a whole faces the challenge of a no-borders networked world.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
On your average web page, you have lots of tiny gif files used for trying to enforce the idea of a static design on the user by padding with them.
At least GIF is better suited here than PNG is -- a typical transparent spacer gif is 43 bytes.
The rendering speed is also important, and here GIF is quite fast compared to many other formats.
The combination of little overhead and fast and lossless decompression makes it well suited for anything that doesn't require either really high compression or lots of colours. Which is probably one reason why the Slashdot logo at the top of the page is a GIF and not a PNG.
Regards,
--
*Art
From what I'd heard, the undead zombies are now working for the patent office.
I can't wait for the next innovation that Unisys brings to the market.
That's fscking funny, man.. seriously.
"IE is the only browser that matters."
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Did I mention underqualified?
WWJD? JWRTFA!
So you all post your 2 cents about this stupid article that in itself doesn't even deserve 1 minute of my time, and you expect people to care about what you have to say, give me a break.
I'll bet if open source sites took a little initiative and started using PNG Microsoft would have a reason to fix what is a ridiculously minor bug in their browser. Until then its just another chicken before the egg scenario.
Quack, quack.
It never bothered Slashdot. Everything is a .gif here. You'd think they'd have switched to .png out of principle.
That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys."
:)
So are they going to start pyaing me to use gimp? i'm not sure if i'd use then even
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
It's like that with any intellectual property. Prices fall to the real economic cost when there are perfect substitutes and enough different suppliers of them to produce any amount (and perfect competition, of course)...for example, certain farm products if you don't care where you buy your potatoes. That simply doesn't work with things like CDs--no matter how much that new Britney Spears CD costs you'll still buy it if it has enough utility to you, even if the Barbara Streisand CD costs loads less. Of course, the oligopoly situation in the music industry doesn't help, and government should be used to block these threats to the free market.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - GIF patent US4,558,302 was found expired in its patent office filing cabinet this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the internet community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy the litigation, there's no denying its contribution to bandwidth conservation. Truly a compression icon.
Note: I can not take credit for this, i read it on kuro5hin.. I thought it was amusing!
- Chuq
Until the day I die, I will pronounce it with a hard G because it makes more sense, and isn't easily confused with .JIF files, another image file format, albeit not one commonly used.
The inventor of the format can correct me all day long. He's still wrong.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
And in true Mozilla fashion, by "support" they meant "half-assed implementation that doesn't work right and then crashes".
Of course, one wouldn't know that because there's exactly 0 MNGs on the WWW.
Yes, I got burned by this at our company, when I found out that the TIFF viewer OCX we bought (Pegasus ImagXpress 6) just returns an error on certain scanned documents unless you provide the number of your license with UNISYS (the scanning software probably tries each compression and finally uses the one that results in the smallest file). I wonder how long it's going to take them to release a version without this restriction.
Karma: none (due to not believing in reincarnation)
I find it amusing that Slashdot posted a troll as a story. Noone is going to drop prices they, are just going to have one less expense and be happy about it. Free software is going to be the cheif benefactor as far as end users are concerned. Troll.
The insightful question to ask would be, what will Unisys do in the next few days? Something similar to what RSA did when RSA expired? That being, toss the patent into the public domain a few days before it expires, turn the whole thing into a big press marketing event, give away some tee shirts, build brand, etc. One way or another, mention of the patent expiring will wind up in every tech mag in the planet, because gif is used all over.. If they do nothing those articles are all going to be "haha!", "gif patent expires, helps open source", and "Unisys loses gif royalty revenue". If they do something smart they can get whatever their thing is talked about in every tech mag on the planet at once for free as a consolation prize..
- My Blog - http://www.memestreams.net/users/rattle/
I hope the Imagemagick guys will now relese a new binary with gif support pre-compiled into the win32 version.
Yes, I still use GIFs for tiny icons and logo graphics requiring sharp and unsoftened edges. PNGs don't cut it
Why do we still need gifs? Other image formats are available that are free and superior. The reason we used to use gifs:
- some rudimentary transparency
- animation
- decent file size (albeit poor colors - only 256!)
As far as I know, all of those are available in PNG, including animation (MNG). Better color management, better compression, a lot better transparency, and even quite wide acceptance - all browsers I know of (except, maybe, Lynx) as well as a lot of apps support it.
So, why are we rejoicing and getting ready to make available all that semi-illegal code of ours that writes gifs? I think it would be better for humanity if unisys just kept the stupid patent, and let the format die. While it is cool to have as many technologies/formats open, sometimes we need to "prune" them to get rid of the ballast and garbage accumulated over the years. Some things just need to die already (gif, dbf, 8.3 filenames, etc.). But they won't die by themselves fast because people are too used to them. So helping them die, even by bad means, like keeping a patent on them, seems to do more good than harm.
Jobs? Which jobs?
Grokking the Gimp
And it's free to download
Oh how I love this stuff...
All the best!
I don't know how much they actually made from LZW, but the modem market has been dying for a long time (does V.90 even use LZW?) and the GIF license was only needed by picture production s/w.
See my journal, I write things there
... for helping us all realize just how irrelevant the expiration of the said patent is.
May we all continue the push for superior and open technologies. Remember that GIF becoming royalty-free does not suddenly thrust it "back" into the position of superiority; cost is not the only factor. The royalty-free-ness of GIF alternatives like PNG were only icing on top of the cake. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of available technologies and choose what best fits.
In other [somewhat old] news: MNG support has been removed from the Mozilla source tree. One of the minor rationalizations was that GIF's patent was due to be dying soon.
"maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys." or maybe the corporations will keep their prices the same and increase their profit margin at the same time.
I hope this page doesn't go away. I hope it is updated to the current state of the relevant U.S. patents on the LZW algorithm held by IBM and Unisys.
I hope the page doesn't go away because it makes a number of other points which are still valid including:
And I'm sure there are plenty of other valid observations. I consider that page to be a concise summary of some level-headed thinking on the subject of (what has come to be known as) software patents. It's often easier to point to that page than to get someone to listen to the speech on software patents or to read the entire transcript of the speech simply because the GIF page is shorter (but less comprehensive).
Digital Citizen
I find it strange that the main pictures on the UNISYS website (banners, large images etc.) are JPEG. Don't they love their little compression algorythm anymore?
Taking the flipside, this is a piece of popular computer engineering that will soon be available for all to use. I wonder what else is due up, I seem to remember a lot of good stuff was done 20 odd years ago.
In fact by quoting old expired patents in comments etc it might offer protection against modern patents, especially as they are being granted for such overly broad reasons.
Thinking ahead in 20 years or so, todays overly broad patents might be the shields against patent claims of tommorrow.
Just idle speculation.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
People have to start somewhere to express their outrage at the corporation that helped put Dmitry Skylarov in jail. Fighting the DMCA is also very important, but Adobe should not be forgotten because they chose to leverage the DMCA against Skylarov. Fortunately a jury didn't see things Adobe's way.
Digital Citizen
Not to speak for the parent poster, but Skylarov would probably be the big issue that anyone would hold against Adobe, and it is a rather large issue.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Ode to LZW Compression
Abe Lempel, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch
Discovered a neat algorithm to squelch
CompuServe incorporated it into the GIF
Good programmers soon caught the drift
The format was published, free and open
Many useful things started to happen
Then Unisys Corp purchased the rights
And changed the terms on LZW overnight
The useful algorithm was off limits
Ransom to corporate greed and profits
On June 20, 2003, the LZW patent expired
Shame on Unisys for what has transpired
Someday Unisys books will be in arrears
While the ideas of LZW survive the years
Slightly offtopic but IMHO very important: the juridical department of the EU has approved a new proposal for allowing software patents in the EU just this week. If it's up to the person responsible for preparing the decision making - Arlene McCarthy from british labour - this will be decided on in the the europarliament on the 30th of june. Please sign this petition to help stop this nonsense. I unfortunately only have a dutch link to the story (here).
0x or or snor perron?!
The rest of the world can get it 2nd hand like always.
Learn your place peon.
I'm in real need of enlightenment, the GIF formats we have now are GIF87 and GIF89a, which I believe refers to their year of development. Has there been any development/improvement to GIF standards since? Is there something like GIF2k3 or something?
If there's has been no more development since, why are we still supporting 'em? Shouldn't we support in favour of newer and actively improving formats?
My 2 cents, monopoly money..
Will sys-admin for food
LZW is a dictionary compression method. There are fundamentally 2 kinds of lossless compression techniques: dictionary and statistical. With the patent released on one of the first good well known dictionary compression, homebrew developers like myself are free to use that algorithm to develop our own compression techniques with no fear of repurcussion. This is a wonderful thing for people like me who are interested in making a better compression format for images. Now all I have to wait is for the patent on wavelets to go, and I can release my secret compression technique involving LZW and the secret wavelet transform of death!
Muhahahahahahahahaha.
1> Create radically awesome compression scheme.
2> Sell to some megacorp.
3> Profit!
<strongbad>Seriously, I'm so awesome!</strongbad>
This is a GREAT example of broken IP laws.
Before patenting the compression technology they placed it into the public domain.
After that IBM patented it AND THEN Unisys filed a patent.
Unisys got to keep it's patent becouse they can prove they had it first. But that proof comes in the form of publishing it.
In other words anything you place into the public domain you or anyone else can clame later.
If there was no GPL the first jerk who came along would sue Linus and RMS for IP theft and win.
The reason Compuserve used this compression technology was simply it was placed into the public domain.
But today there is no public domain just IP waiting for someone to scoop up.
You should not be able to file for and receave patent protection for anything that has already been published.
Well this nightmare will soon be over.
I don't actually exist.
I hope Euclid patented his algorithm.
Every single book (mathematical/computer sciences) are describing this one...
If not I will do.
...is the bad name that Unisys has earned for themselves.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
...when copyrights would expire, too? There was this concept called the public domain, that balanced the rights of the artists with the rights of the community. Remember when the U.S. Constitution mean something?
"Does anyone remember laughter?"
hahaha
... people without a brain can't use linux but windows ...
:p
u got that wrong dude
think about that for a minute
oh wait thinking requires a brain
You should never have to user those spacers, any decient web guy will use CSS and the box layout model.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If you want to import the file as raster content, just use "convert" in ImageMagick to convert it into a raster format such as PNG first.
and that's why I run on a Mac platform as well [...] and screwing with XFree so that windows don't lock (as) randomly.
XFree86 is reliable and efficient, in particular compared to the Mac OS window system.
If your XFree86 server "locks [up] randomly", you probably have bad hardware, unsupported hardware, or perhaps you are just making it up.
too bad they didn't write a book about gifs, then it would never expire thanks to the USA's lovely congress...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
How can anyone celebrate this as a liberation day? From now on the creators of the LGZ-algotihm will get no reimbursement from the people who use it. What this article really says is that nobody has the right to claim ownership to the things theyÂve created, and that these creators are evil if they seek payment for letting people use a portion of the creators minds.
... and before it's even expired, the Perl monks have an implementation out. That's the power of open source, man.
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/press
Let's put this in perspective...
Unisys' one time fully paid up license fees were a couple of million dollars depending on use.
Accumulated from dozens, or perhaps hundreds of companies, it was a substantial source of revenue for Unisys.
But for a licensee with annual sales over a billion, like Adobe, hardly a burden.
Must being defined as they will do it after a pack of lawyers drags them into court.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Look them up before sprouting your ignorant comments.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
People will still buy the product no matter what the cost.
That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys."
Assume they don't drop. What would you infer from that?
Unisys will reapply for the patent in a GIFfy.
I've seen Jakub "Jimmac" Steiner use this "horrid" piece if code (which he rightfully calls it).
From the site:
AlphaImageLoader Filter: Displays an image within the boundaries of the object and between the object background and content, with options to clip or resize the image. When loading a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image, tranparencyâ"from zero to 100 percentâ"is supported.How come MS hasn't integrated this, uhhh fix, into IE by default?
Oh wait, I know - embrace and extend indeed! BTW, I don't use IE.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
I would like to see statistics on how many people actually pay for Photoshop, versus how many people use Photoshop.
Probably more interesting and significant if you looked at how many people use PS for production/professional work, vs. how many of those people paid for it. I'd bet most, if not all of the w4r3z copies are all on amateur computers, for dinking around and doing basic home-photo editing - i doubt Adobe legal even cares, let alone can justify going after people who haven't profited at all from it. If you use PS professonally though, it makes a lot more sense to suck up and pay the $500 than risk getting caught by Adobe and paying a LOT more.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Dmitry Skylarov???
How about that ass patent case against Macromedia?? (I don't care for Macromedia much either, but that "patent" case was fucking retarted).
And all the other crap I'm too lazy to go look up.
Adobe sucks. Period.
Soft G is illogical, eh? Better not tell all those giraffes. They're not friendly when they get angry.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
The company I work for recieves massive amounts of scanned documents of all sorts, but most often in TIF format.
Earlier in the week, I heard that one of our clients decided to just wait until monday (past the expiration) to send our company a large batch of LZW compressed TIF images.
I don't work in the department that handles receiving the images, so I don't know the details, but most of the geeks in my department found the purpose of the reschedule to be quite amusing. =)
There's a Unisys building within a mile or two of where I live. If I were more spiteful, I'd think of something fun to do to rub it in, but I'm lazy and can't be bothered (unless anyone has any good suggestions) =)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The entire patent says nothing about GIF, it does make alot of references to FIG though. ;)
[Got Hosting?]
For one thing, as another poster said, gzip has been along for a long time, while bzip2 is a quite new format. You won't find bzip2 on many machines except newer Linux and cygwin distributions, while gzip is on almost every machine out there (ok, AIX doesn't include it as part of the standard install).
Another factor is that gzip was built for speed as much as compression. You don't want to bog down your machine for long periods of time while, for example, huge log files are compressed.
gzip also has *much* smaller memory use -- the huge size of the compression buffer is mostly what makes some other formats do much better.
Many (if not most) people who run servers will stay away from bzip2 as much as possible because it tends to use more memory and CPU, but also because there's (still) little hope of being able to decompress on Most Any Machine(tm).
Regards,
--
*Art
IIRC, John Bradley was having problems in releasing a new xv version due to GIF patents issue. The latest version dates from 1994 (!!)...
:)
BTW, what's this "Unisys T-27 Emulator" ad over there?
then they got a job and bought Quake || and ]|[ so they could continue playing RocketArena with their friends.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Gimp only does RGB format, and cannot save as CMYK format, as far as I know. I think it's wrapped up in a totally separate patent issue.
;-). However, professional printing companies demand CMYK. Because of that, at this time I can't do without one of the big graphics suites.
I'm a professional artist, and I'd love to use Gimp for my needs (blatant plug, sorry
If Gimp does do CMYK with some special plug-in, could someone point me in the right direction?
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
gif is pronouncable? You still can't get people to agree on whether the 'g' is hard or soft. No matter what the authoritative answer to that question is, people persist in pronouncing it differently. You say gif, I say gif, let's call the whole thing off.
There's no reason why linking against zlib would cause a product to become GPL'd, seeing as they use their own license anyway.
Linking != derivative product, so the GPL wouldn't get you there, TRY AGAIN ASSWIPE.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
So true... mod up.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Then the colors will be in the standard RGB (matching the page) just like you would expect.
I recommend deleting all gamma chunks in PNG files for the web because web browsers generally don't support gamma correction via CSS.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
The European Patent Office and the UK Patent Office both categorically state that "An invention is not patentable if it is: ... a mathematical method ... or a computer program.
Can someone please explain just which UK patent numbers apply to LZW or even better, explain how LZW circumvented the exclusion clauses. I note that Unisys did not mention the European patent numbers in their article.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
Look at their homepage ....
It is kinda funny that they use jpegs instead of their own gifs!!!!
If I was making royalties in the degree they are from a patent like the .GIF patent ... I would make sure that I promoted my money maker by actually using it myself ...
Yes, I know that a gif for those images would be larger than a jpeg .... but it just seems crooked that the people that rape everyone else for using gif's get to use jpegs at no cost to them!!!
-- Just my $0.02 cents ...
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys."
Then again, it may mean higher margins for the companies that make these apps.
Just my $.02
-D
sometimes i like to post obvious goatse links. Sometimes, i like to post stealth redirects, google caches, etc.
Or Congress would have changed the law to extend the life patents for another 50 years.
Messing with Texas again.
Forgive my cynicism, but we all know that the prices won't drop. There will just be a little added profit for the corporations.
Hopefully not off topic, but of you out there that have got into the nuts and bolts of GIF, are there any *smart* encoders out there? I mean encoders that analyse the image and use the various options that GIF allows to encode an image (i.e. break a single image into parts, do more than 256 with multiple pallette, etc)? It seems that GIF had a lot of potential, but with all of the patent crap, people didn't really have a chance to explore things.
Or more likely they'll use it as an excuse to raise prices. It's wishful thinking that now that they don't have to pay royalties to Unisys that they'll pass the savings on to us.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If someone wants the icons to be in PNG format, then download them, convert them and make them available in PNG format. If they only work in PNG8 fine. If you can make them available in REAL alpha png format awesome. If your worried about getting your site swamped contact rob directly, or Submit the files on Slashcode. Rob does responded to email.
Really I don't know why they are transparent anyway. Only the apple section seems to have a background. A plain white square image would not be noticed by most people.
I meant had the gif patent never been enforced, PNG never would have become popular.
My boss wants me to use ClearCase and a web applications that stores files in a relational database. Wish I could just use CSV and SBM.
Most sites currently use .jpg or .png formats that are generally much bigger than .gif. Now that the patent has expired, the use of .gif will become much more widespread and the bandwidth requirements will be decreased. This will speed up the perceived speed, reduce the traffic volume, and probably also reduce electrical consumption. A win-win for everyone!
They are asking money for a download and do not mention anything about free software. Although it might be legal in that they give the source to paid customers who ask for it, it's still shady. Better install fink and get/build a free version of X11 gimp.
The reason alpha-transparent PNGs don't work "the normal way" in IE is due to an old design decision which came back and bit them in the ass.
If you look at what happens when IE renders an alpha-transparent PNG you will see that it is actually using the alpha channel accurately, but it is rendering it onto an offscreen bitmap which itself only has one-bit transparency, so when the rendered image gets passed back to IE the transparent bits don't reflect the underlying page, they only reflect the initial background colour of that offscreen bitmap.
IE was designed to load images in an abstract way, but at the time they didn't make it abstract enough. The latest versions of Windows support ARGB bitmaps in GDI so a future version of IE tied strictly to a future version of Windows is more likely to get support for this due to them not having to worry about dealing with alpha-transparent bitmaps on their older platforms which have no underlying support.
Need help here. I've seen evidence that PNG can really out-compress GIF, but when I try to find out how, all they say is, "Oh, it's a black art - it depends on the image". Now don't mod me as a troll for saying this, because I am all for open standards and open source but this is a genuine question :
When compressing GIFs isn't a black art, how can you expect me (or the average website developer) to use PNGs on the website I'm working on when there is no real guide on what settings/program to use to get that good compression?
I don't want a method that depends on the image or a program with a bunch of compression options where I still need to use "human intervention" for best results! I have a lot of images to compress and I would like a method that I can use on a batch of images at a stretch once I've finished working on them - like I can do with JPG and GIF.
Q : What's my solution till I can do that?
A : Use JPG compression and fake image translucency by synching the background of the JPG with the page backgroung. PITA, yes, but it works with all browsers, the difference is negligible, I get translucency too with anti-aliasing and all it's benefits and I get the best compression.
So maybe somebody here can tell me a way to get "better than GIF" compression for PNGs that I can use in oh, say, a shell script? God knows I've tried to find out for months, with no success.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
For good optimization without much effort, use pngcrush with the -brute option. It'll go through a series of possible option combinations, and generally produces good results. For the best results (generally) with more effort, use PNGOUT. Maybe if I'm motived sometime, I'll write a script for pngout to try out all options.
Protools gives away a free copy
and invariably, someone responds by saying "this is not for any currently available operating system!"
And invariably, I respond "Tough titty."
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.