Yeah, who knows what the hell this will mean in the long run (probably nothing), but the U.S. patent on the GIF algorithm expired yesterday. (Other countries’ patents on it are not yet expired.)
Will this mean the end of PNG? I dunno.
Will this mean graphics products will be cheaper? (Since, say, Adobe doesn’t have to pay Unisys for a GIF license). Hell no.
Will this mean that some GIF tools will come out in open source? Yep.
While this is pretty much of a non-event, is does remind me of when it – this patent – was sorta an event: Back in the mid/late 1990’s, Unisys (who had bought back the patent from … I forget…) started making some rumblings about how it might go after Web site operators who had sites that used GIFs and didn’t have license. People seem to forget this.
I was at a start-up at the time, and I actually spoke with a Unisys lawyer about this, to figure out if we were at risk.
Basically, the lawyer pretty much outlined that we were technically at risk, but – with a small site such as ours – there was nothing to worry about (this was all outlined without him saying as much, of course: he was a lawyer).
Use of GIFs produced by a licensed product (such as Adobe Photoshop) was OK.
But the rub was this: Do you want to police your site, to make sure that every GIF posted – in particular, those that came from out of house (user submitted, freelance artists, company product pictures etc.) – are produced by a licensed product?
Hell no.
If Unisys did go after Web sites for an infringement, GIFs would suddenly disappear from the Web. No company could afford either the risk or cost of policing.
As GIFs disappeared, however, so would Unisys’ licensing cash flow….
The undercurrent of what he said was that if Unisys went after Web site operators (which was doubtful), they’d go after CNN and other large sites, not us. Worst case scenario would be our being in the last tier of being sued, and that would probably come down to compliance by removing GIFs (using JPEGs instead). Big whoop.
But it was a slight disturbance in the (Internet) Force for a short time there.
I didn’t think of it until now, but the GIF fiasco was somewhat reminiscent of the whole SCO vs. [everyone else] battle that’s going on now over UNIX intellectual property (IP).
SCO is actually making rumbles about hitting up the users of Linux, in addition to the Linux vendors – and, by SCOs own admission, the vendors are the ones who are at fault, who are accused of actually performing the theft of IP. And it’s actually a little more than rumbles: They’ve sent letters out to 1,500 of the largest Linux users out there, warning these users that they (and other Linux users) might be culpable in this whole IP mess.
Technically, SCO is correct. Much like the laws about being in possession of stolen property, Linux user could conceivably be held liable for their vendors’ mistakes/crimes/whatever.
While this is, of course, a bluff on SCOs part to make the users either 1) Bail on Linux (hopefully to Unix vendor that pays Unisys for IP rights), or 2) Get users to put pressure on their Linux vendors so the vendors will pony up some dough to SCO.
I really don’t see SCO going after users, unless they can see some way to gain leverage with vendors by doing so.
And – as with Unisys – they won’t go after me (with my home Linux box…); they’ll go after big Linux clients of IBM, HP and so on. Companies the size of General Motors, not the size of “Harold’s House of Fishies.”
It’s all part of the lawsuit game….but it’s creating a lot of FUD out there, and that’s not a good thing.
The tech field is messed up enough in the transition from dot.com=>dot.bomb to where tech is transparent, and the recession/war (was Iraq really a “war” in the traditional sense?) is hosing this up.
The SCO FUD is making matters worse, that’s for sure.