Buddha Buck wrote: | John Chambers wrote: | > One thing you might start to worry about: There has been | > more discussion lately on some other lists about the fact | > that GIF is a proprietary, patented format, ... | > (apparently now Compuserve) has been making noises about | > collecting royalties. When this happens every year or so, | > it persuades more people to switch to PNG, which is very | > similar to GIF in most respects (and typically about 20% | > smaller), but is a public standard. | | That is, unfortunately, not the correct story. Compuserve does not own | the patent on GIF, and they really wish there wasn't one. Unisys owns | the patent on GIF. | | What happened: ...
Thanks for the history lesson. I've looked up some of the things floating around on the subject, and it is quite unclear in most of them just who are the good and the bad guys here. It guess it's still Unisys who are the bad guys. The name Compuserve appears in a lot of the messages, but their role is generally unclear. Whether there is any actual relationship between these corporations is also unclear. (It seems that this is the only context that you ever hear of Unisys these days, though maybe I just don't hang out with the right crowd. Back when they were Univac, they were a big name in the computer biz. I wonder if they are doing anything else interesting? I checked their corporate web site, but as usual it doesn't give much actual information. And I was made a bit nervous by their use of the phrase "relentless execution". Sounds like George Dubya ... ;-) | It really isn't a big deal... the US patent either expired last | December or it will expire this June. The European patents appear to be | valid unitl June 2004. Give it a little more than a year, and the | whole patent issue will be gone. ... unless the patent gets extended. In any case, this issue does seem to be the main drive behind making PNG supported everywhere. There are a lot of web sites that have converted all their GIFs to PNGs just to get rid of the threat of an expensive legal hassle. Since all the current browsers seem to accept PNG, users don't much notice the difference. It also saves a bit on disk space and bandwidth, though the difference isn't huge. One of the discussions that I ran across did mention that Compuserve had legal rights to their GIF clone, and those rights probably will extend well past the end of the original LZW patent. One of the concerns was that, although Compuserve might be sharing today, they are a corporation. As such, their policy could change overnight. A merger or buyout or even change of a few board members could produce this change. This is generally mentioned as part of the explanation why, unless you're a big player with lots of money to spend in court, you just might want to play it safe and stick to public standards when possible. There is a history of corporations suddenly cracking down on infringements after years of silence, and unless you're on the board, you don't know anything about it until you get The Letter. In the past week, there have been a few messages over in the tradtunes list about converting GIF to PNG. Nothing momentous, but some people have mentioned that they are doing the conversion out of fear that their web site could be shut down by the lawyers. Others replied saying that they were looking at the idea. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
