Slashdot Mirror
The GIF Format is Finally Patent-Free
tonymercmobily writes "Not many people noticed that the GIF file format is only now free from patents, as of the 1st of October 2006. Quick recap: first in 1999 Unisys tried to extort money from users and developers. Then, in 2003 the world hoped that the saga would finally be over. Then, in 2004, it was IBM's turn. Now, the SAGA seems to be over for real! Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...?"
... for it to be obsolete.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
This doesn't affect the average user, or even creator of GIFs. I imagine that companies like Adobe would not have to pay a royalty any longer, but this saving is unlikely to be passed to purchasers of image software.
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
My work here is dung.
October 1st came early this year...
As lame as this whole thing was, if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't have the PNG standard today.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...? .....No
Don't Tread on Me
Of course, like most on here, I will relish the day that the LZW patent expires. But look at how long that took to expire. Every day someone patents yet another obvious invention and it holds everybody back.
Take the Certicom 'Patents' on Eliptic Curve cryptography (ECC). Certicom act as if they own ECC - the write it on practically everything they publish.
Yet on close analysis their patents give them almost no real control of ECC. The long and short of it that anything that operates on GF(p) is not covered.
The consequences of this is that NOBODY is using ECC, despite the fact that it's faster and has shorter keys. The whole field is held back for 20 years and nobody can make any progress.
It's not even used in Europe where these patents don't exist. Let me repeat this: The fact that some jerk of a company says it's theirs means the *whole* world doesn't use me.
I really wonder what goes through the minds of these poeple. Nobody wants to pay a fucktard like Certicom (tm) for a license for their mathematics. Nobody in the history of cryptography has made any serious amount of money from selling a security scheme. Why bother?
Simon
Evidence? Except for 1x1 images and the like, you're wrong. And you shouldnt' be using 1x1 images anyhow so...
Before sending any examples, make sure you're comparing same-depth images and have used pngout.
I once, as a demonstration, took a review off HardOCP and converted/recompressed all their GIFs into PNG, and saved several hundreds of kilobytes.
Still webmasters continue to use GIF because of ignorance.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Looking back at the whole GIF patent saga, I believe Shakespear said it best. Much ado about nothing.
so, with a free alternative, why use GIF up to now?
I also did a quick search of common file types on Google*
GIF 519,000,000
JPG 777,000,000
JPEG 111,000,000
BMP 44,700,000
PNG 111,000,000
So GIF is not all _that_ dead. * = Results could mean anything really - PNG could be Paupua New Gunnea, and BMP could be best manufacturing practices.
JPEG isn't a replacement for GIF. 8-bit PNG serves pretty well as a replacement under many circumstances, but it's not supported as ubiquitously, nor does it support animation. Java and Javascript have nothing to do with it, and flash is fine for some animations, but it's certainly no less encumbered by IP restrictions than GIF.
Let's say you have a 4 color raster logo. Are you going to make a JPEG? That'd be dumb. Let's say you have that same logo, and you want to animate it for 3 frames. What's a better solution than animated GIF?
I've written a small PNG encoder and found that for 1 and 4-bit grayscale images, PNG routinely trounces GIF. I expect a 4-bit palette color PNG would yield similar results. PNG's method of cramming multiple pixels per byte prior to compression seems to be much more effective than GIF judging by the file sizes - though I admit I've yet to take a hard look at GIF to discover exactly why.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Properly made GIF images are almost always smaller than PNG images of comparable bit-depth and features, except PNG does not support animation. If you have a simple image with only a few colors, GIF is still the best choice because it is small and fully supported by everything.
Professional web designers should use the best tool for the job, not what's hip and trendy.
=Smidge=
Parent is troll, but I'll bite.
Everything runs fine with jpg, java, javascript, and flash.
Java and Javascript are not image formats. Flash is much broader, is a non-accessible resource hog, and is most commonly used for irritating ads (not unlike animated GIFs, I suppose).
That leaves JPEG, which is actually an image format, but a totally different one. GIF was designed, for logos: it is lossless, has a very limited color palette, and allows for some amount of transparency. JPEG was designed for photos: it's lossy, has a broad color palette, no transparency, and it looks terrible on things with crisp lines, like text or diagrams.
The real competitor to GIF is PNG, which is still lossless, but has better transparency and more colors. Unfortunately, it also has poorly-specified gamma correction, which makes it painful to use in web design.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
The only thing it's used for these days is cheesy animated banner ads, but that's quickly being replaced with flash and java stuff.
First, that's just not true. Go to major web sites, look at the source, and search for ".gif". They're all over the fricken place. And who in their right mind would use Java for a bannar ad? I haven't noticed this, but the idea is completely retarded. Flash--- well Flash has its own problems. You need an expensive program to make them, and a special plug-in to view them. They can be better for certain purposes, especially if you want your ad to be interactive somehow, but if you just want to make a slideshow of completely different images, you're not going to beat animated GIFs for ease, or even size.
Professional Web developers, if they're any good, will use the proper tools for the job, and try to maximize compatibility as much as possible across different browsers. Use of plain HTML, CSS, JPEGs, and GIFs should be used the their maximum capability before looking to Javascript, and certainly before Java or Flash.
Finally, I can now sleep soundly, knowing the flaming torches on by web site are -fully legal- flaming torches.
Are you an skillfull troll, or an ignorant ass? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
The 'vendors' did pay licensing, until something better came along (png). Thanks to Unisys contracts* though, Microsoft never provided proper support for PNG.
* Ask yourself why Microsoft never had to pay gif licensing fees when everyone else did, and PNG alpha layer support stayed broken through 3 versions of Internet Explorer.
In addition to flashing banner ads and stylish web sites, the Graphical Interchange Format has brough us another important wonder.
Your The Man Now, Dog.
Imagine if we never had such a format. Would YTMND even be possible? We can only speculate, but I, for one, would like to thank Unisys for this valuable contribution. Afterall, 361,984—and growing—YTMND sites can't be wrong!
Join Tor today!
1) Pre-IE7 versions of IE do not support transparent PNG without hacks. The hacks are not terribly difficult to implement, but if you don't like hacks, and you need transparent images, you might use GIF. OTOH, you might not: GIF only supports on/off transparency. That means a pixel is either completely transparent or completely opaque. Lots of things like soft shadows only look right with the alpha transparency of PNG. This argument will gradually fade away as IE7 gains widespread adoption. It isn't much of a reason today.
2) GIF supports animation, PNG does not support animation. The other standard, MNG, does, but it has very little browser support. Firefox doesn't even support it out of the box. OTOH, animating an 8-bit image is not considered the height of cool any more; you're probably going to use Flash if you want graphics that move. Again, not much of a reason today.
Conclusion: If you're designing a new website, you probably have no reason to use GIF at all. If any of the above reasons apply to your existing website, it's probably time for a site redesign, eh? Nevertheless, there they are.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
LZW was published in IEEE in '84 by Welsh. It did not mention the patent. Some have argued this made the algorithm public knowledge. Unisys applied for the patent in '83, but did not enforce it until '89 WHEN IT WAS WIDELY ADOPTED. A lot of people that helped its adoption did so under the impression it was patent free.
So... how can it be stolen... if it was given away?
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Slashdot posted something two days early?? *head explodes*
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
That's gonna be a fun file type to say out loud...
"Dude, check out this mung!"
Except that Ogg Vorbis typically gets good rates around 70-90Kbit/s and MP3 gets comparable rates around 160-192kbit/s. When SBR becomes unencumbered (patented in 2003, will expire in what 14 years? 2017?) MP3Pro won't need such licensing and will fall in with Ogg Vorbis; but Ogg Vorbis will pull ahead by a large amount as well and probably show 30-60Kbit/s rates!
Besides, Vorbis handles a bunch of stuff MP3 doesn't, such as a large number of channels (MP3 handles Mono, Stereo, Joint Stereo; Vorbis handle joint channels and disjoint channels but doesn't limit the number, so it could do 14 channel theater-style surround sound).
Support my political activism on Patreon.
That's just not true. I know everyone here is trying to sound cool by saying, "Animated GIFs are teh 5uXx0rs!!!11! You probably use MIDIs on all your pages!"
Yes, the technology has limited practical use, but that's not the same as no use whatsoever. Just like many other technologies in the early days, animated GIFs were overused in horrible designs. But does the existence of a "BLINK" tag mean that all HTML was bad?
Sometimes people use animated GIFs as actual content, and not part of some needless flashing decoration. You know, like if you were describing a process, and you needed to include a simple animation on your page to illustrate your point, an animated GIF might be appropriate. Just maybe.
In the whole of the web, good use of animation does exist. There are even cases of animated GIFs being used in very clever web pages as activity indicators. I hate the term, but you know all this "Web 2.0" junk? Yes, some of it is actually pretty good, and sometimes they make use of animations, and every now and then, those animations are animated GIFs.
What I'm saying is, animated GIFs, like a lot of web technologies, are overused and abused, but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad. It just means you shouldn't use them when they aren't appropriate.
Who modded this informative? You really don't understand patent law.
LZW was published in IEEE in '84 by Welsh. It did not mention the patent. Some have argued this made the algorithm public knowledge.
By publishing it, it was made it public at that time. You don't have to mention that you filed for a patent. You certainly can say "patent pending", but you aren't required to.
Unisys applied for the patent in '83,
So, Unisys filed for the patent before it was made public. Perfectly legal.
but did not enforce it until '89 WHEN IT WAS WIDELY ADOPTED.
Does not matter at all. Unlike trademarks, where if you don't actively defend the trademark there is a risk of losing the trademark, you don't have to defend a patent to make it valid. A patent remains valid even if you don't defend it, even if you allow some people to infringe the patent without suing right away.
A lot of people that helped its adoption did so under the impression it was patent free.
Then they were mistaken. That's their own fault.
So... how can it be stolen... if it was given away?
It wasn't given away. It was published. By publishing after filing for a patent, you retain all your rights to the patent.
Now, you might want to argue that algorithms shouldn't be subject to patent law, but that's a completely different discussion.
OK; bunch of you nay sayers say "ignorance of the law" is no excuse. But this isn't a case of ignorance. Two important things; disclosure and prior art. Its the same reason why Coke doesn't publish the recipe; because disclosure of a recipe (algorithm in our case) is mixing things from the domain of common knowledge. Nothing Lempel, Ziv, and/or Welsh did was unqiue. Sliding windows and dictionary substitutions for compression; I have published ACM algorithms from '68 that have similar concepts. Course now you'll argue that the patent office erred in granting the patent but that doesn't obviate that it was granted and people should have respected the patent. Thats where it becomes totally subjective; if a patent is blatently wrong, its left to the courts to figure it out, with adversaries on both sides that can afford to fight it. Joe hobbiest doesn't give a shit, and its a stretch to say ignorance in this case is willful maleficence. Why? Because if those hobbiests didn't implement the fucking thing, Unisys wouldn't have been able to capitalize on it. No damages.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
The original music from Hampster Dance is a sample from "Whistle Stop" performed by Roger Miller, sped up 70% (as if a 45 RPM vinyl record were being played at 78 RPM). This song originally appeared as the theme song from Disney's animated feature film Robin Hood, and when Hampster Dance went commercial, it might have proven cheaper to cover the song (as Cuban Boys did with "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia") than to license Miller's recording.
Same patent is for LZW in gif and TIFF.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.