Happy GIF Liberation Day!

The ever-so-popular GIF is now free from the royalties of greedy Unisys in the US, Europe and Japan! In the US the patent expired last year, on June 20, 2003; in the UK, Germany, France and Italy in expired two days ago, June 18, 2004. Japanese developers are now free from this yoke too—the patent expires today, June 20, 2004.

A little bit of history. In 1994 Unisys "discovered" that GIF used the LZW compression algorithm, which was covered by patent #4,558,302. All of a sudden one of the most popular graphics formats had a greedy owner. (The whole story awfully reminds me of Forgent Networks and their own silly story). According to Unisys, you would have to cough up between $5,000 and $7,500 to be among the privileged to place GIF images on your sites.

Out of this litigation mess was born PNG—a format meant to be a royalty-free alternative to GIF. Some people say expiration of the LZW patent spells death to PNG, but I don't think so. PNG has become a better, stronger format.

According to Wikipedia the patent will remain in force only in Canada until July 7, 2004. Hang on, guys, redemption is nigh at hand! :)

By the way, this is the same Unisys that had the balls to apologize for the dot.com bubble, the bursting of the dot.com bubble, the concept of multitasking, giving SPAM a bad name, eliminating the concept of regular working hours and many other things. Thank you, Unisys. Without you we would've been living in Stone Ages.

Once again, happy GIF liberation day to everyone. Spread the word, link, and trackback. This is a cause of much celebration.