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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.
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.