On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Derek Ross wrote:
Didn't the patent for the compression scheme used in GIF recently expire?
Also, isn't it just the "compressing party" that would be hit by such a patent? (I don't need to pay patent fees for collecting used machines containing patented gear.)
Maybe it has expired, maybe it hasn't. Unisys don't seem to think that it has (http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/). The FSF doesn't think that it will expire until 2003 (http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/gif.html). It seems to me that the simplest way to deal with the problem is to avoid it by not accepting GIFs. That way we're in the clear no matter what the current position is.
Still, as long as Wikipedia neither codes nor decodes GIFs, how can it be in violation?
-- Daniel