Re: The end of GIF format [was : Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL ]
One questions, is it legal to generate a GIF on the fly to transmit over
the Internet? I'm thinking of something along the lines of a site where
certain image formats could be uploaded to a web site and converted to
GIF. I seem to remember hearing about some loop-hole about the patent
only applying to GIF images that were going to be stored and not to the
transmision of them. The theory was, if a png/bmp/jpg was converted to
GIF format as the output of a cgi-bin, it was OK. Once the data leaves
the originating machine, anything can happen to it.
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> On Thu, Dec 02, 1999 at 09:42:09AM -0800, Don Marti wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 01, 1999 at 11:24:52PM -0700, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > LZW is patented in countries other than the US -- "United States Patent
> > No. 4,558,302, Japanese Patent Numbers 2,123,602 and 2,610,084, and
> > patents in Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom."
> > according to http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzwfaq.html
> >
--
Robin Burgener / Linux Kernel Group / Corel Corporation
mailto: robinb@corel.com
20Q, the neural-net on the Internet - http://www.20q.net
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