Will GIFs Be Free in 2003? 48
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. (Score:4, Informative)
fp.
Re:Expires on 20th June 2003? Nope, it already has (Score:1)
Ok, IANAL, but I am the holder of a patent applied for in 1994 and issued in 1996. I was VERY aware of the change in patent lifetime back then. This one is GONE.
Re:Expires on 20th June 2003? Nope, it already has (Score:2)
Re:Expires on 20th June 2003. (Score:2, Informative)
User -kyz is confused by the patent law everywhere else in the world, where a patent lasts up to 20 years from filing.
With the change of patent law in 1995 by the US, they finally decided to harmonise patent terms with the rest of the world.
A small step for a human, but a giant leap for such a conservative country.
Re:Expires on 20th June 2003. (Score:1)
Mark your calendars!
So what? (Score:2, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
And, when you look at it, LZW is actually quite a nice algorithm to use. It offers incredibly high speed compression and decompression, but performs better than run-length encoding. In case you hadn't noticed, many computer games use decompressed-on-the-fly graphics in their games. While it's no use for video and audio compression compared to lossy algorithims, patent-free LZW would be useful to game developers as it could improve on their often abysmal realtime compression/decompression. Many game houses are still using RLE compression. Personally, I'd recommend LZO [oberhumer.com] rather than LZW, but that's just me.
Re:So what? (Score:1)
Do you know how bzip or the new rar (v3) compares to LZW? I know firsthand that rar v3 is a huge improvement over zip.
Also, how does LZO stand-up and what's the deal (GPLed?, ...)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:So what? (Score:2)
I think the GPL is nice and all, but trying to force it on people by using formats that cannot be used with non-GPL software freely is no better than what Microsoft does with propriatary protocols.
I want Open Source to win because it's *better*, not because some jerk is trying to use nasty tactics against people using an alternative.
Re:So what? (Score:2)
Re:So what? (Score:2)
LZO and the LZO algorithms and implementations are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) { auf Deutsch }. Special licenses for commercial and other applications are available by contacting the author.
The bit about the algorithms is presumably bogus, then.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO, PNG *is* the way to go. However, this does not rule out GIF automatically.
Re:So what? (Score:2)
Re:So what? (Score:2)
It can handle gif-like transparency (single colour transparency) normally. But to support 8 bit alpha level transparency, you have to use a script to 'make it' do it. Here's some example links:
Discussion and howto from evolt.org [evolt.org]
WebFX's script [eae.net]
Petition to Make IE support PNG properly [petitiononline.com] (as if MS would ever listen
Re:So what? (Score:1)
Let's hope so, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let's hope so, (Score:2)
Does Disney own the copyright to this image? [the-head-shop.co.uk]?
Re:Three little letters (Score:2)
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.
Gifs want to be free (Score:1, Funny)
It would be very nice to openly use Gifs, especially considering the known issues [petitiononline.com] when using transparent PNGs in IE.
Re:Gifs want to be free (Score:3, Informative)
I hope the patent still applies (Score:2)
Unfortunately, while PNG is now *used*, it still isn't as common as it should be.
Re:I hope the patent still applies (Score:1, Interesting)
IE (Score:1)
June 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:June 2003 (Score:1)
PNG is nice.... (Score:2)
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?
Re:PNG is nice.... (Score:2)
> To them, GIF is good enough, and nobody has hassled their site yet.
> Why should they change to something less compatible with less features?
I don't know what web developers you're talking about, but I certainly don't feel that way. My latest site uses nothing but PNGs and JPEGs. I don't know of anyone still using animated GIFs except for badly-designed e-commerce sites. Animated GIFs are _so_ last millennium, you know.
FYI - if you're creating PNGs from Photoshop, you should then compress them further with 'pngcrush' (Google to find it) - saves more space! When I changed all my GIFs to PNGs and then used pngcrush on them, they shrunk by about 40% or so. Schweet!
Even better than pngcrush (Score:3, Informative)
pngout - the new PNG compression champion! (Score:2)
38,247 trek-distance2.gif original GIF
56,857 trek-distance2-ps.png first PNG converted by Photoshop 7
34,276 trek-distance2-pc.png compressed with pngcrush
31,531 trek-distance2-po.png compressed with pngout
That's a pretty good compression even over pngcrush, much less over photoshop. Plus that pngcrush one was done with '-brute', to get the absolute best compression
it's capable of.
Not only that, but the pngout executable is less than 10% the size of the pngcrush executable. That's some sweet coding. He apparently uses Watcom C - I've asked the author for the source to see if I can get it to work with gcc. It's a console app, so if I can get it to work in gcc/win32 (I'm using Bloodshed's Dev-C++ package), then it should work pretty well with anything else, I'm hoping.
What IS it with Photoshop's crappy PNG compression? I'm using v7.0.1 (which, I must say, is way, WAY buggy.). *shrug*
Re:pngout - the new PNG compression champion! (Score:2)
imagemagick seems to have the same crappy png compression, unless i need to do something other than "convert image.gif image.png", using -dither or not..
Re:PNG is nice.... (Score:1)
GIF (Score:2, Funny)
GNU stands for GIFs Never Used
the cases IS, FREE, NEVER and USED are left as exercises for the motivated reader.
Unisys Mooning Day! (Score:4, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shhhhhhh..... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Shhhhhhh..... (Score:1)
Too late. Just two words: legislative record.
Re:A bit tangential, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
A patent is 'hard'. That is, the form of the invention is concrete and not open to much interpretation. Either it's the same technology or it isn't. A creative person will always find a way to do the same thing in another (possibly better?) way. This makes patents useless in the long run, from the standpoint of a money grubbing board of executives.
A copyright, on the other hand, is very subjective. If another company comes out with a black-colored cartoon mouse character (please don't interpret that as a racist remark!), Disney could take them to court and argue for years about how they 'stole' Mickey's design and how they're trying to use their character's popularity to 'confuse' people and make a profit. There's a lot of room for legal bullshit here, with the company who can afford to keep the laywers on retainer the longest coming out on top...
=Smidge=
Re:A bit tangential, but... (Score:1)
The idea of copyright is that a poor writer/painter does something very avantgarde and is misunderstood by his generation. Long extension of copyright provides his kin with a nice sum of money, nontheless.
Patents are granted for practial, ready to implement ideas (well, most of the time and within about 5 years at least).
Very crudely stated, that's (one of many) the actual reason.
By the way, just read that Lawrence Lessig proposes here [nytimes.com] (registration required) to provide a system like the patent system for copyright as well.
A good idea, but in my opinion, duration should be limited.
Unfortunately, the Berne convention would have to be modified; it says that there should be no formal requirements to get copyright. Modification will be pretty tough, a lot of countries are involved.
The difference is (Score:2)
However, with patents, you have absolute ownership of ideas, not your implementations per-say. This gives you incredible control and allows you to wield incredible power. This allows you to control entire markets, rather than simply keep thieves at bay.
Nobody is really lobbying for longer patents because everyone recognises how much of a minefield they are. Even IBM and Microsoft have had to pay out huge amounts to patent-wielding shysters. Only pharmacutical companies want longer patents, because unlike the computer industry where you can sell your software the day you get your patent, pharmacuticals can't profit from their drug patents until they go through 20 years of drug approval tests.
Whereas with copyrights, there are many greedy media companies leaning on their increasingly aged laurels.
only valid for..... (Score:2)
patents no more than 5 if you can't establish a market for your idea in 5 years then someone else should be given the opportunity, and companies that just sit on patents are evil.