GIF Patent Expired : Mike Little’s Journalized

Mike Little’s not-quite-so-daily thoughts, babblings, and random synapse firings!

A collection of random thoughts and links. Nothing too exciting. ;-) -- Mike Little

Monday, 23 June 2003

GIF Patent Expired

by mike @ 23:47. Filed under

Geek Stuff

I forgot to mention in all the Harry Potter related excitement this wonderful piece of news:

“On Friday, 20th June 2003, the death knell sounds for US patent number 4,558,302. Having benefitted its owner, the Unisys Corporation 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 and method”, it is more commonly known as the LZW patent or Unisys’s GIF tax.”

This quote from a great summary and timeline by Stuart Caie over at Kuro5hin
It’s not quite all over yet:

“One down, seven to go:
So the US patent has expired. What does this leave?
* The European patent EP0,129,439 covers Germany, France, Britain and Italy and expires on the 18th June 2004.
* The Canadian patent CA1,223,965 expires on the 6th June 2004.
* The Japanese patents 2,123,602 and 2,610,084 expire on the 20th June 2004. “

But nearly…

[link]

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2 Responses to “GIF Patent Expired”

Mike Sprecher Says:
July 3rd, 2003 at 19:43
Did you guys stop using GIFs actually ? I have always liked the format itself and only recently started to look at png graphics.

Given even one of my old PowerBook 540c running MSIE5 was able to display the transparency of my png file correctly. IF you allow to call 8bit Colordepth “legal”, that is *ggg*

just woooondering what things you did to your b2 code to get all these things on your site, but you should use WP anyways hahaha;-)
tim Says:
July 31st, 2004 at 17:28
Wait, so are the LZW patents expired now?

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