Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
Part I
You "argument" lacks all logic. You seem to imply that because one doesn't believe in IP, that one is a Marxist. This does not follow. The set of people who don't believe in IP is not identical with the set of Marxists. For example, many anarchists do not believe in IP, but are definitely not Marxists. 2nd, "Everyone should be..." does not follow from "You believe no one ..."
Part II
Regarding another thread -- the one with the twit "Tom" asking how he was supposed to feed his family, blah blah blah -- I'm going to assume (perhaps mistakenly, but oh well) that your views overlap to some extent with Tom's.
The whole "anti-IP people are Marxists, commies, etc." is bogus. One could easily make the argument that instead it is those looking for IP protection ("intellectual property" -- how can you "own" something in your head ... can someone steal it so that you no longer have it?) who are supporters of a strong, centralized government -- a government which provides so-called IP-trade-barriers and time-limited-subsidies (you get to have this idea all to your little lonesome for 17 years ...). A government that encourages monopolies in a so-called open/free market could hardly be called a supporter of free-market capitalism, which is what so many of the pro-IP people around here so vehemently support (although not necessarily all).
Part III (getting off topic)
I find it hard if not impossible to believe that Tom or anybody else working with algorithms (ooh --- that is, people writing computer programs) has a right to any patents on such algorithms and such. There is the BS argument "if Einstein and Newton wanted to share their ideas, fine, but I don't have to share mine ... don't take away my freedom". 1) Einstein and Newton didn't have any patent-able ideas --- no 'inventions', no specific processes. 2) Such algorithms are quite often merely applications of already-known mathematical relations, etc. How can you 'own' work somebody else did months, years, decades, etc. ago. That's called a free-ride. "Ooh look, I made a copy of the Mona Lisa, but I changed her smile a bit. Now, nobody else can make a copy with a smile like this, it's *mine*." You may have derived something from something else, but as long as that which is derived has no physical existence (scratches on paper or impulses on a magnetic medium notwithstanding), I find it very difficult to believe that such 'results' can be called 'property', and futhermore, giving them so-called 'IP Protection' sounds like a 'free ride' to me. Your freedom isn't being taken away -- you're not losing property, as you never owned it; but patents do take away the freedom of others (to independently come up with something, then have others tell them, 'no, you can't use that idea, someone else "owns it" already.')
Part IV (closing remarks)
A final note: who owns all these patents? Not family-feeding, 'God fearing' (sarcasm) Americans -- rather, it's the mega-corporations that employ them: IBM, MS, Apple, Unisys, Intel, Motorola, Xerox, etc. It is a myth that patents help the lonely little inventor/programmer -- that may have been the case once, but it sure doesn't seem that way now.
--Andra
---
---
Erotic is using a feather, kinky is using the whole chicken.