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?
neurostarI 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.
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.
LZW Patent Expires...
JPGs at Eleven.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
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 $2000 for something that can be represnted by less than 30 lines of code.
The MacGIMP site is getting ready to release a GIF-enabled build of the GIMP at midnight.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Sorry, not yet. As noted on the GD website , the patent doesn't expire internationally until July 7th of next year. So no GIF support in the GD library for another year. :-(
That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys
Ahh what I wouldn't give to be young and naive again...
NO CARRIER
...I want to know when .TXT expires. ;)
The coolest voice ever.
Note, this only applies to the patent in the US.
License Information on GIF and Other LZW-based Technologies
"After expiration of the U.S. LZW patent on June 20, 2003, liability for patent infringement will occur only if an infringing act with respect to a product or service (e.g., developing, selling, offering to sell, making, using, distributing, downloading, exporting and/or importing) occurs in a country where the LZW patent has not expired.
Since each country has its own patent laws and rules regarding what constitutes patent infringement, effected persons may wish to seek advice from their own legal counsel."
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
One day we will see a thread without a theory about how "M$" is going to use this new development to fuck us all.
One day, man.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I'd pay for a Slashdot subscription if Slashdot switched to PNGs because then I'd see they were bandwidth/cost concious.
It's going to continue to be superior to GIF. GIF is only useful today in the GIF89a flavor, which supports animations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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...
PNG is supported on every browser and has been for years, even PocketPCs support it.
;)
'gif'-like PNGs, truecolor PNGs, and boolean transparent PNGs work great everywhere, but IE (for Windows; IE for PocketPC and Mac render fine, go figure) can't handle variable alpha transparent PNGs without tricks (and the 'AlphaImageLoader' trick fails on https:// addresses due to another IE bug, horray Microsoft).
There's no reason to use non-animated gif rather than PNG. PNGs are smaller (some crappy programs do a poor job of compressing them, convert PNG to PNG in GraphicsMagik to shrink), can do truecolor so you don't have ugly dithered gif graphics, and can do variable alpha transparency (although 5 year old bugs in x86/IE require detecting IE and spitting out ugly MS-specific HTML for this; most people just settle for boolean transparency, which is a shame). Even ignoring the functionality that is hard or impossible to use on x86/IE due to IE being a buggy mess, PNG still does more than gif (except animations - almost no one supports MNG right now).
Recent versions of gd and PHP have support for all these PNG modes. I know, as I fixed them.
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!
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.
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.
I would love PNG to take off, but if IE support isn't there, its DOA.
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.
I had a similar experience with ASCII art and a 300 baud modem...
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
IANAL, but here's Canada's patent act.
;-)
Interesting sections:
27(8) No patent shall be granted for any mere scientific principle or abstract theorem.
>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)".
No point, because then it would only cover that device. For example, let's say it convered palm pilots using this neato LZW method. No worries, I can still use it on my computer.
I doubt Canadian patent law would allow such a broad definition as "Any device using this method". Because that's what it would have to be to encompass everything the LZW patent already does.
And just because it is patented here doesn't mean the patent isn't contestable. The only patent I could find (mentioned at this informative site) on software was contested and the patent nullified.
How'd I do?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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
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
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.