On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 07:44:36PM -0800, Terry Hancock wrote: > On Monday 11 November 2002 11:02 am, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > > Fortunately, the lzw patent expires this coming June. > > Is that true? That would be really nice! (Finally, I can support buggy > old browsers in my web application). No sarcasm -- lots of people are still > using them, and I'd like to use some GIFs to keep them happy (I'm not really > going into production mode until June anyway, probably). I've heard rumors that derivative patents of LZW have been filed as a gambit to keep the original patent from being effectively useful to anyone. Pharmaceutical companies play similar games (at least in the U.S., where government-subsidized monopolies are considered an intrinsic aspect of the "free market"). However, I've only heard rumors, not anything I'd consider definitive. -- G. Branden Robinson | Communism is just one step on the Debian GNU/Linux | long road from capitalism to branden@debian.org | capitalism. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Russian saying
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