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The GIF Format is Finally Patent-Free
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Sep 29, 2006 02:04 PM
from the happy-birthday dept.
from the happy-birthday dept.
tonymercmobily writes "Not many people noticed that the GIF file format is only now free from patents, as of the 1st of October 2006. Quick recap: first in 1999 Unisys tried to extort money from users and developers. Then, in 2003 the world hoped that the saga would finally be over. Then, in 2004, it was IBM's turn. Now, the SAGA seems to be over for real! Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...?"
Related Stories
[+]
Ask Slashdot: Will GIFs Be Free in 2003? 48 comments
Ark42 asks: "Did the Unisys patent on LZW expire back on Dec 10, 2002? Does that mean we can all write GIF software royalty free now?
From what I can gather, Unisys only lists patent number 4,558,302 for covering LZW, which was filed on Jun 20, 1983 and issued on Dec 10, 1985. According to this site patents filed after Jun 7, 1995 last 20 years from the file date, and patents on or before then last 17 years from the issue date. That means the LZW patent expired on Dec 10, 2002. Am I missing anything?" A deadline of 2003 was given in this earlier Slashdot article. Assuming .GIFs can't follow in the footsteps of Mickey Mouse, will the popular image format now be "web safe"?
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GIF Slips Away From Unisys; Your Move, IBM 609 comments
Twenty years ago, Terry Welch's improvement on Lempel-Ziv compression appeared in IEEE Computer magazine. The authors of unix 'compress' and the GIF standard incorporated that algorithm without realizing it was patent-pending. When the submarine patent surfaced ten years later, its new owner Unisys intimidated developers and web authors into moving away from GIFs, inspiring the creation of a better standard, though sadly still a less popular one. Today, July 7, 2004, Unisys's last LZW patent (in Canada) expires, leaving GIF once again free... almost. See, there's the small matter of IBM's patent, granted on the same algorithm, which is valid for another two years. That still has a chilling effect on GIF development, though the consensus seems to be that IBM would lose any court action it tried to bring. So how about it, IBM? You've got nothing to lose! Want to make a lot of geeks happy and release that final patent into the public domain?
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News: Unisys Enforcing GIF Patents 483 comments
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.
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Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure a big supporter of PNG, but understand why GIF is still around.
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Just in time... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Informative)
Not being a web developer, I'm not familiar with the features and benefits of MNGs, but if they're at all similar to animated GIFs, I hope Firefox's image.animation_mode=none setting will apply when visiting the web sites you design.
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Like spinning arrows marking paragraphs?
Howabout dancing pokemon?
Forum avatar images that flash, blink and jump?
Emoticons that wink and wave?
Really, is there any way that technology has enhanced your web experience for the better?
There are two metaphors here people are used to: Static reading mode, and TV mode. Combining the two is a no no. Do NOT animate portions of a reading metaphor (over-stimuli), and do NOT ask people to just read words via video (under-stimuli).
The same goes for sound. If people want to listen to something, OFFER it to them, and let them control the start and stop of it. Playing sounds unasked on a web page is just...trashy. Animations are no different.
HINT: Adblock is popular for a reason. Even IE6 allows one to stop GIFs from animating.
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Just in time... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure a big supporter of PNG, but understand why GIF is still around.
You mention that they are limited to 256 colors, but I think the real strength is that they can be limited to as few as two colors (or one and a transparency.) You can get crisp effects where they are needed (like black and white line art, or text) much better than the JPEG (which will do its best to bleed, in an effort to make the image look more like a photograph.)
It's also far more compact-- which is less of a concern for the end user now that dial-up modems are the exception rather than the rule, but can be a boon for a site concerned with bandwidth. And for simple animation it's far easier to create than a flash banner.
I prefer PNG myself-- but it's amazing how many users still have browsers that don't support it. Hell, it's amazing how many users don't have browsers that support flash for that matter. GIFs will always have a place with those who know the strength of the format.
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Re:Just in time... (Score:5, Funny)
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Evidence? (Score:4, Informative)
Evidence? Except for 1x1 images and the like, you're wrong. And you shouldnt' be using 1x1 images anyhow so...
Before sending any examples, make sure you're comparing same-depth images and have used pngout [advsys.net].
I once, as a demonstration, took a review off HardOCP and converted/recompressed all their GIFs into PNG, and saved several hundreds of kilobytes.
Still webmasters continue to use GIF because of ignorance.
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but really.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hilarious? USPTO is Hilarious (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
Happy October 1st (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Happy October 1st (Score:5, Funny)
*For large values of 'now'
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well (Score:5, Insightful)
no. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:no. (Score:4, Informative)
Not entirely true. gzip is substantially faster and less processor intensive than bzip2, and is still commonly used where speed is as important as size. gzip is also more suitable for compressing streams than bzip2, which operates on large blocks, if I remember correctly. For those reasons, gzip is still heavily if not exclusively used for on the wire compresson, for example in transparent compression of http pages or cvs downloads.
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Patents, the world, and Certicom (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, like most on here, I will relish the day that the LZW patent expires. But look at how long that took to expire. Every day someone patents yet another obvious invention and it holds everybody back.
Take the Certicom 'Patents' on Eliptic Curve cryptography (ECC). Certicom act as if they own ECC - the write it on practically everything [certicom.com] they publish.
Yet on close analysis their patents give them almost no real control of ECC. The long and short of it that anything that operates on GF(p) is not covered.
The consequences of this is that NOBODY is using ECC, despite the fact that it's faster and has shorter keys. The whole field is held back for 20 years and nobody can make any progress.
It's not even used in Europe where these patents don't exist. Let me repeat this: The fact that some jerk of a company says it's theirs means the *whole* world doesn't use me.
I really wonder what goes through the minds of these poeple. Nobody wants to pay a fucktard like Certicom (tm) for a license for their mathematics. Nobody in the history of cryptography has made any serious amount of money from selling a security scheme. Why bother?
Simon
Thank god and the patent office (Score:5, Funny)
Re:killed the format (Score:5, Insightful)
JPEG isn't a replacement for GIF. 8-bit PNG serves pretty well as a replacement under many circumstances, but it's not supported as ubiquitously, nor does it support animation. Java and Javascript have nothing to do with it, and flash is fine for some animations, but it's certainly no less encumbered by IP restrictions than GIF.
Let's say you have a 4 color raster logo. Are you going to make a JPEG? That'd be dumb. Let's say you have that same logo, and you want to animate it for 3 frames. What's a better solution than animated GIF?
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Re:killed the format (Score:4, Informative)
so, with a free alternative, why use GIF up to now?
I also did a quick search of common file types on Google*
GIF 519,000,000
JPG 777,000,000
JPEG 111,000,000
BMP 44,700,000
PNG 111,000,000
So GIF is not all _that_ dead. * = Results could mean anything really - PNG could be Paupua New Gunnea, and BMP could be best manufacturing practices.
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Re:killed the format (Score:4, Interesting)
The only thing it's used for these days is cheesy animated banner ads, but that's quickly being replaced with flash and java stuff.
First, that's just not true. Go to major web sites, look at the source, and search for ".gif". They're all over the fricken place. And who in their right mind would use Java for a bannar ad? I haven't noticed this, but the idea is completely retarded. Flash--- well Flash has its own problems. You need an expensive program to make them, and a special plug-in to view them. They can be better for certain purposes, especially if you want your ad to be interactive somehow, but if you just want to make a slideshow of completely different images, you're not going to beat animated GIFs for ease, or even size.
Professional Web developers, if they're any good, will use the proper tools for the job, and try to maximize compatibility as much as possible across different browsers. Use of plain HTML, CSS, JPEGs, and GIFs should be used the their maximum capability before looking to Javascript, and certainly before Java or Flash.
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