Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
neurostaryou 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/
...what's going to happen to PNG?
I use gif a lot. A recent website I completed used almost entirely gifs, because it's for a boring company (agriculture) who wants (specifically) a boring website, simple gradients, few colours, few non-logo images... And in JPG it'd be 3 times the size. Until PNG is more widely accepted in browsers, gif will have its place.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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.
There's also a workaround workaround to make alpha transparency work correctly.
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.
... 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.
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.
the problem w/ PNG not working in browsers is that alpha channel support is pretty sketchy (read not present in IE)
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I would love PNG to take off, but if IE support isn't there, its DOA.
Its utility was long ago surpassed by JPG
No wonder you don't remember what it is, you've probably never know. Comparing JPG and GIF is a little bit like comparing my Van (I have three kids) and your Porsche (You're single). Different formats for different uses.
Try to fit my whole family in your Porsche and you'll see why GIF cannot be surpassed (or replaced) by JPG.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
hmmm, except it wont slowly die. if anything, this will usher in more acceptance, as people can adopt its use without cost
YOU SUCK BALLS!
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?
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
I agree with you, but people will be reluctant to use PNG until IE properly supports PNG alpha transparency. I give them another five years or so :)
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.
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?
... 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.
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
Maybe, just maybe, some very specific software patents that required exceptionally much research could be justified for a short term of let's say five years.
Only problem: megacorps and small patent litigation sharks would be pushing the gates open wider and wider by lobbying the legislative powers.
Under their pressure,
* "some very specific software patents" would very soon become "anything that even remotely looks like a software idea".
* "required exceptionally much research" would become "woke up this morning, saw this idea on a tech hobbyist site"
* "for a short term" would become "for a short term + 20 years, +50 years, +100 years...".
Which is why I'm opposed to software patents.
...is the bad name that Unisys has earned for themselves.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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
Well, X has been known to crash and burn at times. And whether the guy get this because of hardware issues or bad drivers doesn't matter. What matters is that it happens to him in X and not with his Mac.
Just accept that he likes his Mac instead of accusing him of making stuff up.
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
That's not the issue. It seems that Unisys let everyone start using GIF format for 15 years... waited until it was standard for web graphics... waited until millions of websites used their technology... then decided to enforce their patent. Because they did it this way, their fees were ridiculous... and if they would have enforced this 10 years ago... GIF would have never become a standard on the web.
At least RSA was upfront about their patent from the begining.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
PNG is fully supported in every major browser (Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera) except IE, which supports PNGs that have all the features of GIfs (ie, no alpha).
PNG is widely accepted. PNG is technically superior to GIF, and a good way to persuade Microsoft to implement alpha transparency in IE is to use PNGs exclusively.
Just accept that he likes his Mac instead of accusing him of making stuff up.
I have no problem with him "liking" his Mac. I object to his claims that Macs in general are more reliable than Linux+XFree86. That's just wrong.
And whether the guy get this because of hardware issues or bad drivers doesn't matter.
It matters a great deal: if it is a hardware or driver problem, it's not a problem with the X server as he suggested. He controls what hardware he buys, and the best-engineered software can't help him if he tries to use bad hardware.