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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Announcements and Press Releases => Topic started by: Ni72ous on May 18, 2004, 04:22:29 PM

Title: GIF/LZW Patent expires in europe
Post by: Ni72ous on May 18, 2004, 04:22:29 PM
According to the Inquirer, the GIF/LZW patent covering europe has now expired.

Read about it here. (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15986)
Title: Re: GIF/LZW Patent expires in europe
Post by: Adasha on May 18, 2004, 05:52:14 PM
Well thank God for that, and may I be the first to say screw you Unisys!

Anyway, we should all have moved on to PNG a looong time ago. Screw IE too!
Title: Re: GIF/LZW Patent expires in europe
Post by: Waccoon on May 19, 2004, 06:19:38 AM
Ho hum.  I'm moving my whole website to PNG images, now that I finally can save PNG files smaller than GIFs.

I doubt PNG will become any more popular until Photoshop support of the format stops sucking.  I mean, the average PNG saved in Photoshop is still loads bigger than any GIF.  What the hell is Adobe's problem?!  Then again, aftermarket plugins aren't much better.  I have the SuperPNG plugin for Photoshop from Fnord (http://www.fnordware.com), and the files it produces are still too damn big even with the metadata stripped out!

PngOut (http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm) by Ken Silverman is a godsend for web authors.  Ken Silverman ROCKS, and I'm surprised a person with his intuition isn't working for some megacorp.  I wish someone could make a GUI version , though (PNG Gauntlet is a .NET front-end for PngOut, but it's too damn buggy and more trouble than it's worth).
Title: Re: GIF/LZW Patent expires in europe
Post by: gnarly on May 19, 2004, 03:30:28 PM
Ahem:
Quote
"Our reader Janne Paalijärvi from Finland noticed something odd about the dates in the recent article about the expiration of the Unisys patent on LZW compression in Europe. I stand corrected: the patent expires June 18 in UK, Germany, France and Italy, and two days later in Japan."
Title: Re: GIF/LZW Patent expires in europe
Post by: justthatgood on May 21, 2004, 12:40:01 AM
I think that all software patents are a bunch of BS.  Especially those %@#$!^ SOB's that are using software patents to screw people over with the JPEG's.