Re: Latest UNISYS LZW patent nonsense -- $5,000 for every web site
On Aug 25, Ben Gertzfield wrote:
> Well, UNISYS is up to it again. They want $5,000 (count 'em: five
> THOUSAND DOLLARS) from *every* web site that uses GIFs, TIFFs, or PDF
> files with LZW compression.
My understanding is that they only are requesting payment for people
using files generated by programs that are not licensed. Since
non-commercial software is already licensed (under their "free
license" provision), I suspect they would have a very hard time
proving you used unlicensed software to encode the graphics.
If in doubt: giftoppm graphic.gif | pnmtogif > graphic.new.gif
Nonetheless, I plan to remove all GIFs from my websites and put them
back up as PNGs.
Chris
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