The GIF Format is Finally Patent-Free
Posted by Sachin Garg on 30th September 2006 | Permanent Link
This one comes straight from Slashdot (and FSM), it seems that the last of Unisys’ GIF patents have finally expired. But has Unisys not given up yet?
The GNU web site has a page on the GIF format. At the bottom of the page, you can see:
1. We were able to search the patent databases of the USA, Canada, Japan, and the European Union. The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it expired on 18 June 2004, in Japan the patent expired on 20 June 2004 and in Canada it expired on 7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM patent expired 11 August 2006, The Software Freedom Law Center says that after 1 October 2006, there will be no significant patent claims interfering with employment of the GIF format.
But on Unisys LZW page it says:
Unisys Corporation holds and has patents pending on a number of improvements on the inventions claimed in the above-expired patents. Information on these improvement patents and terms under which they may be licensed can be obtained by contacting the following: [...]
Maybe its just that Unisys still needs to update their page. Or we will know soon.
October 3rd, 2006 at 3:33 am
for all practical purposes, unisys or their patents dont matter
October 30th, 2006 at 10:03 am
No matter being PNG far superior to GIF.
November 18th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
Show me animated pngs before you make any claims about png being better (implying always). mngs are supported approximately… nowhere.
November 19th, 2006 at 3:56 am
For stuff like that, people now use flash based videos. With all the available bandwidth, mngs are not that useful for internet now.
But how good have animated GIFs been for internet in the first place? I remember those pre-text-ads days when all those flashy gifs made internet such a lousy place. Flash is ofcourse equally annoying when overdone.