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Unisys Enforcing GIF Patents
ESR writes "Remember the flap back in 1994-1995 about the GIF
format, with Unisys behaving like jerks over the LZW compression
method and threatening to charge license fees for use of their bogus patent?
Well, brace yourselves. It just got worse. Under
Unisys's new policy, they've gone beyond shaking
down software authors. They're now threatening to sue even noncommercial websites that carry GIFs
for a $5000 license fee, regardless of whether
the GIFs were generated by licensed software or
not.
The gory details are at Don Marti's Burn All GIFs Day site.
Time to convert all your GIFs to some other format. I like PNG
better than JPEG, as it's lossless. The PNG
site carries a gif2png tool that does a good job;
I just used it to clean up my personal website.
GIF animations won't survive the conversion, however...uh, wait. Maybe Unisys just did us
a favor after all... " Here is the Unisys page that started it all.
Absolutely, I mean, if I spent several years developing an algorithm like MP3 - I shouldn't have ANY right to make money off my sweat and blood. I should be elated that someone came along, read my code, and distributed it to the whole world. My family didn't need to be fed this year. Tom
More like you speant years developing an algorithm like MP3 for your software. Then when you release it, a dozen people sue you into oblivion for using "a method of reducing the size of a file which encodes audio by reducing the amount of data encoded into the file in such a weay that the listner can still recognise that a sound was recorded", and "A method for distributeing a sound by means of a device which follows instructions encoded into a stream of binary values", and finally, use of "a method to induce people to give you money in exchange for something they want for their computing device".
All invalid, and all backed by more money than you've ever seen in your lifetime, and all willing to make an example of you at a loss so others will toe the line.
IMHO, unless of until this whole mess can be fixed, most people would be better off without patents existing at all.
This doesn't disappoint me too much - gif was way outdated as it is.
Hold on? Perhaps they ARE being nice to us after all - I mean, it takes so long to get old deprecated crap out of the worlds computers (Win3.1, etc) - maybe this is the fast track way out of the whole "backwards compatibility" bind!
UPGRADE OR I'LL SUE!!!
It's a format with a whopping 256 color palette. It's so out of date right now that I'm surprised its survived as long as it did. I assume that people keep them around because of the possibilty of animated gifs (hooray -- annoying banner ads and cheezy clip art).
:)
PNG is far superior in most respects. I'm surprised its taken so long to catch on. I assume that this new Unisys move is going to help it get bigger.
æeee!
As nice as it might sound to get rid of those damn animated GIFs as banner ads, this might lead to something far more annyoing and evil: Java banner ads.
(shudder)
Besides GIF, are there any other formats that support animation? From what I understand (which may be false), animation was tacked on to the GIF format after a while; could the same thing be done to PNG (or even JPEG)?
-ElJefe
Some operators of Intranet and Billboard Web sites have had difficulty determining whether they need a license from Unisys for use of our LZW patented technology. If you use any of the types of images specified above on your Web site that you received from an unlicensed software developer
or service, you should have a license from Unisys to use the LZW patent. Or even if the developer
or service provider has a license, but it doesn't cover your use of the particular application you
received, you should have a license from Unisys to use the LZW patent.
Well I'm glad that cleared that up.
Whats really interesting is if you read theirlicensing definitions apparently this $5000 dollar license is strictly for noncommercial websites. Commercial websites need to negotiate the license seperatly for each case. This could easly lead to Unisys choosing to apply a heavy hand to some and not to others.
ROFLOL - If I were a moderator I would bump this up for funniness!
In my job, I work with a legal department (won't name names, but you could probably find it by looking at my old posts
"Holding things up" really does seem to be the job of legal, though of course they recieve plenty of assistance from our loyal gub'mint.
heh.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Netscape hasn't needed a plugin to show PNG for a long time. It still doesn't support alpha blending, making it still useless for background-independent antialiasing, but it still does view them.
... or applets.
Of course, with no animated PNG support, MNG notwithstanding, that means all those annoying banner ads will be in javascript
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> And for every Windows that rears it's ugly head, there is a Wine. :)
And about a million more whines. Sorry, couldn't resist.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
kato wrote:
contact the Unisys Licensing Department at 215-986-5693 (or fax at 215-986-3090) to ensure that you're safe. If they expect me to pay anything, I'll be sure to keep whoever answers the phone talking for a couple hours.
If you've got a toll-free number for us, more people will do it. I, for one, can't afford to pay for hours of cross-country long distance phone charges, even for a good cause.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Like MNG the Merciless?
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
This doesn't sound like my understanding of the patent. They have a claim on the compression/decompresion algorithm, not the output.
I agree 100%! Unfortunatly, that doesn't stop them from going to court. Court would almost certainly cost more than $5000. Personally, I'll just migrate away from GIF until the patent runs out. PNG and MNG will hopefully have taken over that niche by then anyway.
Yes, my friend is still at Intel, and you're likely right that patents lead to raises and bonuses, even stock options, I would expect that as well.
However if he had moved to another job, been laid off, or fired over a dispute he would no longer be gaining benefit from those patents, other than as nice resume trophies (which are worth money, but enough?)
My point is that patents are for the benefit of corporations. And hey, I like a vibrant economy as much as you do. They do let it trickle down to their employees. But it is disingenuous to say that their purpose is to allow individual software innovators to profit from their ideas since that rarely happens, except indirectly.
Jim
Actually their stockholders are by and large, probably wholly ignorant of the whole fiasco, and if they know anything about it, they are clucking their tongues and sighing at silly legal departments trying to squeeze licenses out of end-of-life intellectual property. Because that's what legal departments *do*, among their other jobs. R&D develops, Marketing pushes it out, Sales keeps it rolling, Legal holds it up. Sometimes Marketing wants R&D to keep leveraging old tech, sometimes they push for the impossible. Sales wants Marketing to transfer technology the market won't accept, or find new ways to sell the same junk in different colors. Legal tries to find ways to create licenses for products that are only marginally theirs (e.g. IBM has a patent on LZW too) and tries to keep leveraging IP when it has long since become commoditized. Every department has a shifting concept of what's important now, and they don't all overlap.
Welcome to the weird world of corporations.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
What you mean is MJPEG commpresion, which is basically every frame a Jpeg image. But mpeg doesnt have this.
One of the things that mpeg has is ability to have a keyframe every few frames.. think of a keyframe as a jpeg image.. the other frames inbetween keyframes are differential frames. they store only what are the changes between frames.
This allows to save alot of space, as often frames are almost the same. Now the changes per frames are saved only for sections that have changes. Next the frame is split into a 8x8 pixels boxes, and the framechanges note where did those boxes move to (to save even more space).
Not all mpeg compressors use this keyframe thing (I heard xing doesnt do it, but then many people dont appreciate xing for quality, but speed only)
Anyways... so mjpeg is really similiar to an mpeg with every frame being keyframe.. its easy...
doing keyframe every 3 frames improves quality per file size ratio, but on the other hand for fast pased sequences you can see some artifacts (but then its fast paced, so the artifacts change very fast as well).. this is the point that I heard few people complain about DVDs.
anyways... hope this clears the confusion a bit..
No, he means that when you follow a link that leads to an image zgv is executed to show you the image. Images embeded in html will still show up as [IMAGE] for all those sites that think netscape/msie are the only browsers on the planet.
-matt
"This is one way in which programmers actually get paid for their work and can thus earn a living doing what they love. I just can't see a problem with that."
That's very interesting. I'm really glad to hear that L, Z, and W will be getting the money from the license. Silly me, I thought it was just going to the bottom line of a multinational corporation.
I have a friend at Intel with patents, and he gets zero dollars on those patents, its just an ego thing. Is it not true that nearly all patents are enforced by corporations, and all corporations require surrender of intellectual property that is work-related when you hire on?
So, explain to me how patents are keeping programmers fed, please. I already understand that they are crucial to keeping lawyers fed.
Jim
You are a troll by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29, @12:36 EDT (#) PNG's compress better than GIF's (5% to 25%) in almost every other case PNGs compress better in *only* one case: 256 colors. 128 colors GIF and 256/PNG are about the same, everything less GIF performs better. There's a vast difference between having an honest to god alpha channel and a simple transparent color. PNG's /do/ still compress better, No way! A PNG with a full alpha channel never compresses nearly as good as a "transparent" GIF, except for pathological cases. and an alpha'd PNG image will look antialiased against whatever background you put it against,The same can be done with alpha'd GIFs. There really is no difference between GIF/PNG in a'aliasing Images to the background. PNG can do it in the File Data, it can be done to GIFs after decoding. Of course there is a difference between full alpha and a single transparent color, but that was not the point.
Try this experiment some time: Create a GIF image with an anti-alised edge on a white background and put that on a web page with a black background. that ghosting around the edge of the GIF is the reason you want a true alpha channel. Sadly most browsers still don't support the alpha channel on PNG (it's not like the format is undocumented or particularly difficult to work with or anything!).
I read the internet for the articles.
pdf is open, you troll. go write your own viewer. the format is extensible, so i would be very surprised if it could not handle jpg and png images.
sc
Hrm, topiclinux.gif, topicnews.gif... before Slashdotters go out and raise the hackles at Unisys, perhaps Slashdot should clean up it's own act in regard to Gifs since you are now a bit more of a High Profile Corporate Entity. I'd hate to see you be the test case for this.
Not entirely. In civil cases (anything brought on by someone who isn't the government), the accusing party only has to prove that it's more likely that you did than it is that you didn't. Basically they have to convince you 51% that they are right. So if you are brought to court in a civil matter you pretty much have to prove that you are inocent. Hence why OJ got off in the criminal charges but not on the civil charges.
-matt
Err, I share my office with the guy who last overhauled the EST Inc. web site. I assure you that those are PNG images on the left menu. The version of GIMP that he uses doesn't even support GIF due to the patent issue.
The banner ads and such, though, are animated GIF's. Those all come from an outside graphics artist, and basically we go with what he sends us.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Your article on evolt spreads outdated information -- because Unisys changed their minds since the "Unisys Clarifies Policy" article you reference was published. Unisys has revoked their freeware exception and has been actively going after freeware authors. You did notice that it isn't on the Unisys web site, didn't you? They flushed the original page down the Orwellian memory hole.
Unfortunately, the word of most corporations is worthless if it is not in a legally binding contract.
The LPF and their website is pretty much dead.
Use JPEG. Netscape 4 for Linux does support PNG, by the way -- see http://www.estinc.com for an example. The little menu images on the left side of the screen are little PNG files.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Since I can afford neither their licensing fee nor the commercial software to create LZW-format according to their license, I have removed all gifs from my site.
Thought this one was over back when it was the "Compuserve-GIF" issue. Guess I was wrong; can't be bothered to beat this horse any more.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Have you ever heard of trade secrets? Trade secrets are the equivalent of proprietary formats. They don't allow your competitors to make use of your innovative new ideas. Patents are open. Anyone can use a patented method. Patents are the nineteenth century equivalent of open source.
Admittedly, the area of sofware patents is somewhat murky waters, but in general patents are a GOOD THING. Without patents there would be no incentive for inventors and innovators to publish their work, and a strong incentive not to publish (since they would have a monopoly, until someone could reverse engineer their product).
You can have JPEG-compressed images in PDF documents already. As for "PNG compression", there's no such thing. If you're talking about Flate, PDF 1.3 supports that too.
If you use any of the types of images specified above on your Web site that you received from an unlicensed software developer or service, you should have a license from Unisys
Please read it again. It means that if you use an image I created for you, and I didn't pay unisys their $5000 tribute, YOU must pay it, even if I used a graphics editor from someone who DID pay the tribute.
Note that if I am your employee, one of us must pay the tribute. (and it wouldn't be ME!)
Now, I'm not say'in nothing, but you know that accidents WILL happen. Everyone needs insurance...
From the same company that PROUDLY advertises that their employees are expected to work 24/7 wether they're at the office or not (the 'monitorhead' commercials).
Go to all of the government websites.. offshore websites.. private websites...
the courts would be FILLED... I don't believe ONE thing will come of it.
USA 800-328-0440
Canada 800-387-6181
Canadian French 800-361-8097
From http://www.uscsc.unisys.com/contact.htm
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
After reviewing this site:
http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStor y/lzw-license.html
It looks like this thing is for real, but there's a bit too much confusion. Essentially, it looks like a web site operator would need to get one of these licenses if they either write their own gif-making software or if the people/products that they use to get GIF's make the images without giving Unisys a piece of the cake. So, if you use Photoshop, you're fine. However, I'm not sure what the implications would be for something like the GIMP. Since I'm not sure if the creators of the GIMP paid Unisys their "fair share," I think it would be on me to pay the fee. Damn.
My best advice is for everyone (and I do mean everyone) to contact the Unisys Licensing Department at 215-986-5693 (or fax at 215-986-3090) to ensure that you're safe. If they expect me to pay anything, I'll be sure to keep whoever answers the phone talking for a couple hours. I'm sure they'll have enough people to handle a phone slashdotting. Or maybe not. We'll see.
Unfortunately, Opera doesn't yet support PNG. Until it does, I'll be using JPGs and GIFs on my pages. When it does, I'll switch over. I'm not going to use crappy Netscape just so I can see some PNGs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I scanned Unisys's page, and it appears they are claiming their licensing fees from everyone who uses any LZW-using formats. That includes PDF and PostScript files with compressed bitmaps.
I could care less if GIF bites the dust, but I'm more than a little perturbed about PDF. Does the PDF format define any alternate compression schemes?
The Unisys patent is only on the process of compressing or decompressing via LZW. Images aren't covered. The reason they are going after websites, are to "protect" the website against liability if they use unlicensed products to create their GIFs.
Their website license is outlined here: Stupid Unisys page
There's several solutions:
I have news for you: They can. The plaintiff in a civil suit is entitled to the defendant's evidence, or the plaintiff wins. The question isn't even close.
In fact, most law-school graduates, and a fair majority of judges, are bright enough to recognize that procuring a violation of your duties under the patent law is the same as violating them yourself. The tricks that work to avoid exporting crypto software don't work here.
"A good lawyer who does pro bono work." Imagine the scene: You go into a law office, and explain you want them to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, rents, and expenses, in order to defend a lawsuit you deliberately incurred because you assumed they'd bail you out for free. Instead of doing less-expensive work in defense of the rights of a genuinely poor person. And your chances of success are...?
Also, the ugly fact of American law is that it is in the hands of lawyers, judges, and legislators who sincerely believe there is no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit. To them, filing suit is a sacrament of a free people, like voting or going to high school. The system does not even admit that being sued costs defendants anything, lest plaintiffs and their lawyers be held accountable for abuses. A filing would have to be the obvious product of paranoid schizophrenia before your lawyer would expect to get sanctions for it. Effectively, there is no ethical limit on filing a lawsuit in America.
This does suggest that as Open Source assets become rich enough to invite legal predation (see the SW patent proliferation topic of 8/28), the community ought to set aside part of its IPO gold rush to defend itself.
I'm not an intellectual property attorney but it seems to me this is the ultimate unenforceable stance. I've been cranking out GIFs for years and I defy you to tell me what software created the file and which software merely modified the file, and to prove that you can do squat about it even if you can prove how I made the file.
And everyone had who said it was time for a new vector based graphic format was correct too. However, how many such formats have those of us who pay attention to such things seen come and go. At current we have Flash and Shockwave for vector based graphics WITH animation (the only reason i use GIFs)AND interactivity. But everybody's dragging their feet about making them the standard, so they won't be. And 5 years from now GIF will still be around.
I'll admit that at the poles, under the winter ozone hole, there do not seem to be many frogs on the ice.
Like, you know, RMS. Ever taken a look at http://www.gnu.org? Sorta funny.
Every blasted picture has the same silly tag attached, "no gifs due to patent problems".
It links to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html, and talks about how they think GIFs suck and that they won't use them for various and sundry reasons, the gist of which essentially states that not doing so is both a defensive measure and a protest of the patent.
"RMS is an alarmist." "RMS is a fanatic." Looks like he hit it square on the head, folkses -- Unisys has officially Cracked Down on the use of their patent.
Not that I can figure out how this is going to profit Unisys one single dime. Is someone spiking the water?
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Someone replied to one of my comments before and directed me to this site.. I just wanted to say thank you to that person and share this url with anyone else who is interested in the downfall of Intellectual Property. Some of my friends have made (and continue to make) a lot of money off IP. Hell, my own father is a composer, but as much as I try I still don't fathom the justification of IP. Share your ideas.
How we know is more important than what we know.
That's if the info was public before the patent. There is a one-year exception, where the inventor has one year after publication to file his patent. The publishing of a patent makes the process public, so your statement makes no sense if you know the process. Obviously you're not aware that the patent is public info -- anyone can go look at that precious patented process, but the patent blocks them from using it freely until the patent expires. The advantage to society is that the patent does eventually expire.
according to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
the patent should expire in 2003..
https://www.mav.net/teddyr/syousif/
--
Time is on my side
hmm.. if unisys only wants money from people who have created it with programs that are not licensed... then someone should write a gif2gif program and pay the $50000.-- licence for that and then give away the gif2gif programm for free on the web.. the program would convert gif with or without lzw into gif with lzw. if we collect the $50k that should be easy and we would not have to worry about gif anymore.. or maybe someone with money would want to sponsor this.. (redhat? ibm? ..) one would not even need to have downloaded the gif2gif as one could always claim that it was mad with that..(thus the gif2gif should leave the "createy by" string of the original program..)
just an idea..
greetings from vienna, austria.
mond.
It's very possible to create uncompressed GIFs anyway (pseudo-gifs), but that's really not an answer to the problem.
Get a real job. You make an mp3 format because you want to compress music.. you plant radishes because you want to eat radishes.. at what point in the universe does mp3 format = food? Some time in the not too distant future I hope we will develop a solution to your question (yes, I do think nanotech will save the world, at that point ideas will equal food because you can "design" the food or scan it in and replicate it add infinitum) but at the moment I don't know how to make money out of IP without forcing people to pay you. Sorry, forcing people to do stuff is *bad*.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you create a new algorithm, you can choose not to share the source with the world. Feel free to make money with it. But I doubt that it will be used a lot as the world is full of proprietary data formats.
If you want the world to use your algorithm, publish it. Many will love it and start using it. But you can't expect to sit on your butt for the rest of your life collecting money from that one idea of yours. Make own products using it. At least you have the edge because it was you who created the idea in the first place.
If in the end the whole world uses your algorithm, you won't have any problems whatsoever to get a good job. Think about it, this is exactly how Linus Torvalds did it and he's not whining. Instead, he has a nice steady paycheck at Transmeta and he can choose any place to work at.
My company makes software that uses GIFs... you would not BELIEVE the bullshit these guys put you through.
Because of our license agreement with UNISYS, all of our customers are required to register with them before they can use our software. (We did this because we could not afford to license the technology out right.) Basically they have to get a special code to enter into our software before the GIF stuff will work. They also require some of our customers to pay an extra fee WHICH THEY DETERMINE ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS! "Hmmm, how much you got?"
The worst part is most of our customers are non-profit government entities who don't have a lot of money to start with. In these cases UNISYS says that they can get the code for free, but requires them to pay a 500 dollar processing fee.
grr....
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
/sounds/ cool.
:-) It
The spec is finalised, which is cool. Now we just have to wait for some cool hacker to put it in Mozilla. Screw IE, it can't even show PNGs semi-properly, except on Win32 platforms (Mac, etc, ports are b0rked).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
2) Exactly what should we do as web site operators? I realize that the best thing is to switch everything to .png, however, the question is when, if ever? (I do plan to, myself). I know that Burn all Gifs day is yet set, but question is, when if any is Unisys Police going to start combing the web sites? Right now is not the best time for me (defense is within a month) though I'll find the time if the UP will be out soon enough...
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
- PNG's compress better than GIF's (5% to 25%) in almost every other case.
- There's a vast difference between having an honest to god alpha channel and a simple transparent color. PNG's
/do/ still compress better, and an alpha'd PNG image will look antialiased against whatever background you put it against, as opposed to GIF images, where you will frequently see light and dark background versions. - I can do without animations.
:-)
So don't go around accusing others of looking stupid for preferring PNG. There are reasons.--
Ian Peters