In a web site I saw a notice they would discontinue using GIFs and would switch to another format because now Unisys was going to enforce their patent on GIF. This page http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/default.asp of Unisys says pretty much the same thing. Can anyone explain this to me? I donot dispute their right if they have it but it seems to me pretty much impossible to enforce at this point. How long have they been trying to enforce this? What have they done? Any success? It seems to me they are wasting their time.
And BTW, what about the JPG compression? Who invented it and why is it freely available and not patented?
As I understand it, most programs that support GIF encoding do, in fact, license with Unisys for the rights. On the other hand, I don’t see them listed on Netscape’s “About” screen. I do agree, though, that they’re going to have a heck of a time trying to enforce anything.
Meanwhile, JPEG is the format designed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (hence the name), a commision to find a standard format for photographic images. I think that it was intended to be publicly available.
Facetious questions:
How many millions of people will Unisys have to sue, and in how many hundreds of jurisdictions, to enforce this? And how many people will they be able to sue before they go broke?
Unisys will never succeed. GIFs have been freely available too long.
Ouch. It sounds like Unisys thinks that they are going to collect license fees from everybody that displays .gif’s. Fat chance, but they can certainly try.
I don’t read that as “you cannot distribute .gif files”, BTW, so most web sites which simply have .gifs in them should be OK. The patent is on the decompression software. Logically, Netscape and other browser vendors would have to license the technology, so that you could legally look at the .gif somebody’s site handed you. I’m not a lawyer, though.
Since Microsoft’s license doesn’t extend to reusability in their SDK, it sounds like everybody who wrote something using MS development tools who wishes to display .gif’s in their product has to pay Unisys. That’s a potential mess, especially for shareware .gif editors that are floating about, and are probably MFC or VB developed applications. If Unisys can really push it, I wonder if MS is liable for a lawsuit concerning their development tools from everybody displaying .gif’s in their products. Sounds like MS dropped the ball big time on this agreement.
JPEG (.jpg is the three letter extension) stands for “Joint Photographic Experts Group” and the format is defined by a committee:
It seems like the Unisys link in the OP is mainly trying to target software developers who incorporate GIF read/write technology into their products.
I doubt they’d go after someone who is just displaying gifs on their site. If I were writing a program that used an API for handling GIF images, I’d have to get a license with Unisys. If I used such a program to encode a GIF image and then just displayed that as content on my website, I think that’s a different matter. It depends on what they mean by “the reading and/or writing of GIF images.” Enforcing this for anyone who uses GIF as content is, of course, absurd. Eforcing it for application developers–that would be much more realistic.
sailor, did the site say why specifically they couldn’t use images any more? Was it just because of static content?
I am not sure I understand the issue. I have several programs that can save in GIF format (MS-PAINT is one of them). Does it mean the program creators got licenses from Unysis and I can make as many GIFs as I like?
In that case, why can’t the site I was visiting do the same thing? The site is a ham radio site where you can put in some data and get an azimutal map of the world centered at your location: http://www.wm7d.net/az_proj/az_html/azproj_form_short.shtml
The license is for the use of the GIF encoding/decoding algorithms, and not for the right to display the images. Thus, if Microsoft wants to display GIF images in IE, they’ll have to pay Unisys for that right. But you as a web author don’t have to pay a license to anyone, because you didn’t write the decoding algorithm.
In our company, we’re having to jump through quite a few unnecessary hoops to avoid using GIF’s, because we won’t pay the license fee.
I have to wonder how defensible that license is going to be. The courts often rule that if a company doesn’t take action to defend their intellectual property continuously, they can lose the right to it. This is to prevent exactly what’s happening - a company can develop something, let people use it freely by not enforcing their rights, and waiting for a large market to develop on it before cracking down and suddenly demanding license fees after the use of their algorithm is entrenched.
sailor, since the site you are referring to seems to generate customized .gif files, I would guess they have an application they wrote to generate the .gif’s, and they have stopped doing it because they didn’t license the technology from Unisys. Perhaps they are even in the position I alluded to of having used the MS SDK to develop their app, believing this gave them the right to manipulate .gif’s using the API distributed by Microsoft.
Yes, theoretically, the creators of your editor were supposed to have gotten a license from Unisys allowing them to distribute the technology, so that you could create all the .gif’s you wanted with it as an end user of the program. Similar to the license the browser maker like Netscape would have to get to allow people to view them.
For a format to be used by anybody, you CAN’T realistically expect to obtain license fees on actual content using the format. Even if you had the right, that would be so restrictive that nobody would use it. You can, however, license the technology for rendering or producing said format, limiting the licensing to application developers, as we have been saying.
Again, I’m not a lawyer, so take all this with a very large grain of salt.
Actually, Adobe is trying this for their e-book PDF format. Their PDF Merchant software (http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfmerchant/main.html ) lets you distribute encrypted PDF files; you then sell the key to the e-book. They charge something like 2% of the key transaction charge per sale, like a credit card. Thus, ever time you distribute your content, you have to pay Adobe!
I foresee pdf going the way of divix, if they try that. The public will just use another format and drop pdf. I already don’t save files in a format specific to one graphic’s software.
I had software at least three years ago that didn’t have the gif format available, due to the legal problems arising at the time. This isn’t a new problem for people that incorperate gif format in their programs.
That’s a format which protects the content copyright, which is a different issue than patent rights on the format itself. Adobe may be trying to take a cut for the “service”, but the main reason for doing it is to protect the content. Divx was another example of such a scheme, as is Sony’s new “magic gate” memory stick (I believe Sony takes a cut for the “magic gate” decryption scheme. I’m not up on the details, so I may be wrong).
That’s a good point, yabob. I guess it really isn’t the same thing as Unisys trying to control the creation of GIF files (regardless of whether either one is a good idea or not).