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
06/19/2003 10:23:58 AM EST (>3. 06/19/2003 07:09:10 PM EST (>4. 06/19/2003 07:31:22 PM EST (>5. 06/19/2003 10:34:27 AM EST (>4. 06/19/2003 12:56:21 PM EST (>4. 06/19/2003 11:19:11 PM EST (>2. 06/19/2003 04:15:20 PM EST (>3. 06/19/2003 07:53:25 PM EST (>4. 06/19/2003 08:12:16 PM EST (>2. 06/19/2003 11:20:04 PM EST (>4. 06/19/2003 11:40:23 PM EST (>3. 06/19/2003 06:23:28 PM EST (>4. 06/20/2003 02:03:19 AM EST (>5. Call me paranoid, but I'm not rushing to use GIFs again. One of the products I work with could definitely benefit from this being public domain now, but I'm just waiting
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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
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
knowledge in about 1990, leading to a huge uproar in the online world. Some paniced BBS sysops even took their GIF p0rn offline out of fear. CompuServe or Unisys tried to queal the flames by announcing that there would be no "GIF Tax" -- only encoding/decoding software would be covered; and that interested parties should contact them. As this only affected software developers, there was a huge sign of relief among users. Adobe and other image software makers licenced LZW in 1990-1. Unisys must have said more than "nothing" to them at this time. In 1993, Mosaic spread
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