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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."
About time, talk about a legacy format.
past the end of contract expiration in order to agree to license LZW?
This is my sig.
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.
The MacGIMP site is getting ready to release a GIF-enabled build of the GIMP at midnight.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Not sure how much, but I work at a medium size company who produces multimedia applications (yes your mom would have heard of us) and .GIF support was expensive enough that we left it out of the product.
I'd pay for a Slashdot subscription if Slashdot switched to PNGs because then I'd see they were bandwidth/cost concious.
I'm wondering if the text on gnu.org protesting the patent will disappear :)
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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.
One of the Mozilla developers decided to drop MNG (animated PNG) support against the advice of nearly everyone else involved. Their reasoning was that it took up a whole 200kb of disk space.
But yeah, it'll remain much better than gif, and all the Photoshop users will say it sucks because Internet Explorer displays them too dark when saved from Photoshop.
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.
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?
It's really all a matter or price elasticity. Pricing isn't quite as dependant upon production costs as most people believe.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
No, the Gimp sucks because its support for well-documented, established, standard file formats like EPS still lags behind that found in simple toys like PaintShop Pro.
Until it can read and save standard files in a way useful to me for file exchange, I don't care what the UI looks like, what features it has, or what the license is.
Right, but as most nations don't recognize software patents, that doesn't matter as much as you might think.
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.
Cable TV is subject to competition?
All depends on where you live. I live in a relatively small town in Ohio and I can get time warner cable tv/cable modem, or the local goverment run cable tv/cable modem. Interesting enough, I can get digital Time Warner cable tv with all the pay channels AND road runner internet service for $72/mo. What's the price for all this if I live one town over? $180-190/mo or so I hear, as no I know would actually order all that shit at that price, but that's what the local Time Warner salesmen tout.
Me? I choose the local cable company out of spite, and it's comparable pricing anyway, maybe you don't get all those channels, you don't get digital cable, but I don't need all that shit, as I don't watch much TV, besides, they offer a business grade cable modem service with better upload, which is very important to me since i work from home.
The local town here also runs it's own eletric company, and buys eletricity in bulk from Ohio Edison. The result? Our eletricity costs 1/3 of neighboring communities.
Big deal... both fit in a single TCP packet with plenty of room to spare for HTTP headers, so in the end it makes no difference to the visitor, both images download in the same amount of time. And both fit in a 512 byte filesystem cluster, so they take the same amount of disk space.
Internationally here means 'in Canada'. In Europe and Asia, the software patent does not hold water.
So GIF is free for all of the world except Canada now.
We are under a Free software revolution in Thailand (see my sig), so I am seeing reviews of Linux / OO.o / others in almost every magazine. The reviews generally run like this: "The program works well and doesn't crash often, but I don't recommend its use because it's interface/hotkeys/configuration is/are not like the equivalent program in Windows that I am familiar with." I do not claim that GIMPcan compare to PS, but we use it full time in my school, and my wife has known nothing else.
Sometimes she reads books on PS (there are none for Gimp) and says "Wow! that's cool. That takes me xx commands in Gimp," but both she and I know that 90% of the stuff can be scripted, by us or somebody else. I hope to spend some time with Script-fu and get those for her.
The other 10% is functional stuff that I have no way to fix, like CMYK. We don't do print, just in-house web stuff, so we are fine.
Put identity in the browser.
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?
It worked quite well for the companies that actually did the price undercutting, Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines.
You hit the nail on the head. It also worked well for the companies that differentiated themselves by giving a higher level of service and/or product quality, and charged more for it. In the airline industry, Continental has refused to cut meals, service quality, etc., and actually improved service levels - and they're doing quite well. Not Southwest well, but pretty well. In the retail arena, Target is trying to be the designer Wal-Mart, with quality goods from guys like Michael Graves, and doing a bang-up job of it.
What's your damage, Heather?
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.
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