Will GIFs Be Free in 2003?

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"?

Expires on 20th June 2003.

US Patent 4,558,302 [uspto.gov] was filed on the 20th June 1983. Under the laws at that time, it expires exactly 20 years after being filed.

fp.

So what?

Okay, GIFs are good for cartoon-type images, but PNGs really are starting to become more common-place. Probably the only people who'll continue to use GIFs are those who were using them despite the patents and probably couldn't care less. Most people who were worried about the patents would have moved to some other format (probably PNG) and I doubt they'll see much of an incentive to move back.

Silly patent-holders on a widely-available image format. There are much more profitable things to be patented (human birth probably isn't patented, and with really good lawyers you could probably dismiss prior 'art' as pornography or something)

Re:So what?

bzip and rar are both high-performance archivers. They're not intended to work at any high speed. LZW is a high speed algorithm intended to compress quickly rather than compress well. LZO is also a high-speed algorithm, but it compresses slightly better than LZW, and the decompression speed of LZO is far faster than LZW.

bzip2 (note the 2) uses simply burrows-wheeler block sorting with move to front compression, with huffman as the entropy encoder. It will remain like that forever, and not introduce any more compression algorithms. In fact, bzip (version 1, before bzip2) used arithmetic coding instead of huffman, so it actually produced better compression, but IBM et al have a bunch of patents on arithmetic coding, so bzip2 will never use them until they expire. Block-sorting is a "clever trick" to LZ compression, but it doesn't "scale", i.e. you can't put a better predictive model into it and get better compression, the best you can do is put a better sort algorithm in, and we all know that sorting is pretty much at the limits already. RAR on the other hand uses a whole load of algorithms, including Dmitry Shkarin's PPMII which is a statistical compressor that outperforms pretty much anything (at the cost of being very slow). It also has a range of "multimedia" filters, i.e. special processing for images, audio and executables that make the data easier to compress when the real compression is used. RAR isn't open source. If you want something that stands up to it that is open-source, check out 7-zip. bzip2 is not going to get better any time soon.

Let's hope so,

Provided they aren't .GIFs of Mickey Mouse [dcp-undergrads-start.com]!

Gifs want to be free

It's in the name. G(NU)IF.
It would be very nice to openly use Gifs, especially considering the known issues [petitiononline.com] when using transparent PNGs in IE.

June 2003

According to ImageMagick's [imagemagick.org] file formats page, the LZW patent expires in June 2003.

PNG is nice....

....but its been slow to take hold.

Why? App support and developer inertia.

Photoshop 7 still has crappy PNG support.

IE still doesn't support alpha right.

And web developers are still upset that PNG didn't include animation. To them, GIF is good enough, and nobody has hassled their site yet. Why should they change to something less compatible with less features?

GIF

GIF stands for GNU Is Free
GNU stands for GIFs Never Used

the cases IS, FREE, NEVER and USED are left as exercises for the motivated reader.

Unisys Mooning Day!

I'd like to propose the idea of a mass Unisys mooning day to show the old dinosaur what we think of obvious patent abuse.

When June '03 rolls around, how could we get as many asses in .gif format presented to Unisys? Someone with a lot of bandwidth wanna register 'fuckuni.com' or 'unidinosaur.com' for this purpose?

A bit tangential, but...

Isn't it odd that the US government keeps extending copyright (now past 80 years), and patents are only valid for around 20 years? I mean, isn't it a lot more expensive to research a technology than it is to write a few pages of text?

Re:Three little letters

Who gives a toss about GIF anymore?

I do.

I write quite a bit of embedded software, and the GIF format is just the thing for many of my images. I have a nice lightweight GIF decoding library that is small and fast. Sometimes I want to render directly to RGB, but usually I want to keep the 8-bit values and palette until I need them, or I need to render the pixels to YUV. It's a lot cheaper to build a YUV palette once than to transform every single pixel from RGB to YUV after the fact.

I hope the patent still applies

It was one of the best motivators for technological improvement ever. PNG is better than GIF for almost *all* images except *extremely* small images, like those one-pixel spacers that people used to use.

Unfortunately, while PNG is now *used*, it still isn't as common as it should be.

IE

Nope it doesn't, as I wrote in another post here, IE mangles PNG pictures a bit. And it doesn't support PNG alpha channel either.