I couldn't think of anywhere else to put this so it's appear on the main page. The article is a bit old already, but I haven't seen it anywhere on here yet.
Friday 20 June has been dubbed Gif Liberation Day as net users the world over celebrate the end of a costly patent agreement.
The patent for the Lempel-Ziv-Welch, or LZW, compression algorithm is set to expire in the US on Friday. It also expires in Europe, Canada and Japan in June of 2004.
The patent claiming ownership of the file squashing format was lodged by Unisys in 1994 and underpins one of the web's most popular ways of encoding graphics files.
LZW forms the basis of the popular Gif format (Graphics Interchange Format), a way of storing and sending images on the internet.
The full article is here:
BBC Technology News
