Nov 24th 2007 by http://dionpills. GIF patent dead at 20 || kuro5hin. I just heard some sad news on talk radio - GIF patent US4,558,302 was found expired in its patent office filing cabinet this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the internet community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy the litigation, there's no denying its contribution to bandwidth conservation. for 20 years, the contents of the patent are entered into the Public Domain and may be used absolutely freely by anyone. Officially titled "High speed data compression and decompression apparatus
handling. He calls it LZW, after the names of the inventors, Lempel-Ziv-Welch. The article includes a justification for data compression, an overview of common methods, and a detailed explanation and runthrough of the LZW algorithm. is released by Spencer Thomas, after the LZW article was published but before LZW was patented. readers, Spencer decided to implement the LZW algorithm he read in the magazine, completely unaware that there was a patent pending on the technique. 10th December 1985>: LZW patent is granted. September 1986>: The Sperry Corporation (owners of the Sperry Research
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the patent is expiring, it'd be nice to see someone sue those swine and win- they need a solid kick in the nuts. The patent would have put GIF out of its misery sooner. Now, if only IE would render alpha-channel PNGs correctly without ugly hacks, GIF would only exist as a annoying animations, and could be blocked compleatly. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. The Rest 2000 - Present Kuro5hin. that runs this site is freely available, under the terms of the GPL. My heart's the long stairs. %Dza֫pFC&P]->+ Se ]r˔:˗'o?PS?ye#zZІK6
but I didn't realise that it was illegal to use gif. Thank goodness I won't have to convert them all to jpg. There's a few million of them. Stick, thine posts bring light to mine eyes, tingles to my loins. Yea, each moment I sit, my monitor before me, waiting, yearning, needing your prose to make the moment complete. 06/19/2003 09:43:11 AM EST (>2. I've used PNGs instead of GIFs as long as I've had a website (Which is down till August, but still. I've never had any problems with them. You're not really part of the problem. 06/19/2003 10:02:01 AM EST (>4. 06/19/2003 10:04:51 AM EST (>3.
in the slightest. What happened to the "BURN ALL GIFS" rallying cry? It has been forgotten. There are all sorts of excuses; "It's too much hassle to convert all my graphics and their links", "Internet Explorer doesn't support PNG properly", "PNGs can't do animation and nobody supports MNGs". The best one of all: "Unisys will never sue me!". I wish Unisys a happy year squeezing the very last drops out of their monopoly. or "Why He Stopped Writing Compression Software". You must accept a cookie to log in. I don't have a website. I have some, but I'm changing them all to PNGs. Unisys will
Center) and the Burroughs Corporation merge to form Unisys. 15th June 1987>: Bob Berry and the team at Compuserve release a new graphics file format called GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). It can handle anything from 2 to 256 colours -- wow! -- and the graphics data is compressed with LZW. Just like Spencer, they had read the LZW algorithm in a magazine and had wrongly assumed that it wasn't patented. The GIF format becomes even more popular. tries to bring up the issue in public. Unisys have been ensuring hardware manufacturers (e. modem manufacturers and Postscript printer manufacturers)
and method", it is more commonly known as the LZW patent or Unisys's GIF tax. Don't buy ram at Apple. You can save big money when you buy your memory at MacMemoryStore. Most popular compression techniques build on this technique and most archivers (e. ZIP, ZOO, ARC, gzip, LhA, CAB, Arj, RAR, StuffIt) include it in their compression methods. I only mention this to tell you it's unrelated to LZ78 or LZW. [US4,464,650]>), but the LZW derivative is widely used. Terry Welch has been working for the Sperry Research Center and invents a derivative of LZ78 with much simplified, faster dictionary