burnallgifs.org
Contact Us 10 Burn All GIFs Day mailing list archives 11 Subscribe to the Burn All GIFs Day mailing list 12 Please do not buy from Amazon. Amazon boycott page at the Free Software Foundation site. Bay Area Web developers march for software patent reform 20 June 2003: The LZW patent expires today in the United States. However, patents on LZW are still in force in other countries. In mail dated Monday, 23 June 2003, Unisys attorney Mark Starr asserts that LZW patents are still in force in Canada, France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. More importantly, do not allow your communications to be censored by patent holders. Oppose the expansion of software patents to your country, if such patents are not available there now. Insist that standards bodies in which you participate make an an "innovation compatible" (IC) license a requirement for any patents needed to implement a standard. Develop and support software that works with non-patented file formats and network protocols, instead of patent-encumbered ones. Please do not mail the maintainers of this site to ask if the LZW patent is still in effect in a certain country. If you are concerned about needing a patent license to do your work, please support patent reform. I'll just use GIFs without a license, and give those patent weasels the finger! By switching your site to PNG, you encourage users to upgrade to PNG-capable browsers, and 20 show big-budget sites that they don't have to pay multi-million-dollar royalties to Unisys. Helping make Unisys lose a GIF licensing deal is a better way to give them the finger than just using GIFs on your site. Web sites with GIFs on them have nothing to fear, right? Yes, but it wouldn't stand up in court, so ignore Forgent. Also read 25 PNG Tips for Cartoonists by Drake Emko, and check out some of the web comics in our 26 Spotlight on GIF-free sites section. Other, much better, methods of data compression are not covered by any patent. The Unisys LZW patent expires in the USA on June 20, 2003. However, according to Unisys, they hold LZW patents outside the USA that expire in 2004. LZW is used in an obsolete graphic format called GIF, which many web sites use in order to be compatible with old web browsers. Unisys 30 claimed that patents on LZW are in force in the United States, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The catch is that it appears to be difficult or impossible to get a Unisys license to use LZW in free software that complies with the 31 Open Source Definition or in 32 low-volume proprietary software. The fact that Unisys was able to patent LZW is due to a flaw in the 34 US patent system that makes even 35 pencil-and-paper calculations patentable. You could violate some US patents just doing the story problems in a math or computer science textbook! However, Unisys's actions are legal under US law, so the only reasonable alternative to paying the "Unisys tax" on the web is to upgrade graphics from GIF to 36 PNG format, or 37 MNG format for animations. Despite the title, 38 PNG Tips for Cartoonists is a good intro for all web artists who want to use PNG effectively. A 39 A study conducted by James Bessen and Eric Maskin shows that: Through a sequence of court decisions, patent protection for computer programs was significantly strengthened. We will show that, far from unleashing a flurry of new innovative activity, these stronger property rights ushered in a period of stagnant, if not declining, R&D among those industries and firms that patented most. Unisys has changed their position on GIF licensing (see below) and they can change it again. Unisys does not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services. Concerning developers of software for the Internet network, the same principle applies. Unisys will not pursue previous inadvertent infringement by developers producing versions of software products for the Internet prior to 1995. The company does not require licensing, or fees to be paid for non-commercial, non-profit offerings on the Internet, including "Freeware". In all cases, a written license agreement or statement signed by an authorized Unisys representative is required from Unisys for all use, sale or distribution of any software (including so-called "freeware") and/or hardware providing LZW conversion capability (for example, downloaded software used for creating/displaying GIF images). The 46 Freedom Technology Center is an IT training facility in Mountain View, California. Find out how you can 51 pack 65,536 different colors into a 678-byte image, and learn other advantages of the PNG format. Protect your privacy with your favorite web filtering tool and a long list of 54 Ad server IP addresses. Includes full text of the world's first telephone directory published in New Haven, Connecticut, USA in 1878. Smokey Bear says extinguish GIFs before leaving your campsite: 74 Yosemite National Park is GIF-free. Here's another 76 GIF-free C64 page just because Commodore 64s rule. There may be some limitations of use if you are using a Jasc Software product to operate a web server, internet server or bulletin board, or if you are an on-line vendor using the software as a means to run your on-line service. If you have questions regarding this, please contact us our legal department at ADDRESS . For the lossless interchange of raster images that have no geospatial context and where none of the above cases apply, such as the exchange of still-images that can be viewed in sequence (also referred to as animation), the mandated standard is: * Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), Version 89a, 31 July 1990, CompuServe Incorporated. Unisys has had 14 years or so to develop their position on LZW licensing, and one more flame war won't change anything. Switch to a non-patented graphics format, burn your GIFs to call attention to the fact that you're doing so, and avoid patent minefields in the future. When it comes to the web, Unisys didn't just miss the boat, they missed the harbor and the ocean. Burn All GIFs Day is about getting out of patent problems, not about getting into flame wars. Burn All Gifs Software 82 gif2png is free, Open Source software to convert GIF images to PNG images under Linux, Unix, MS-DOS or Microsoft Windows. The gif2png distribution also includes a script, web2png, that can automatically convert an entire website, including patching references to the converted images in HTML and PHP pages. Available at no charge for unlimited use and noncommercial distribution. It can be run from a commandline in an MSDOS window, or from a UNIX or LINUX commandline. Its main purpose is to reduce the size of the PNG IDAT datastream by trying various compression levels an PNG filter methods. It also can be used to remove unwanted ancillary chunks, or to add certain chunks including gAMA, tRNS, and textual chunks. Microsoft IIS webmasters: read this document if PNG images on your site are visible from Microsoft Internet Explorer but not from Netscape browsers. Developer Information You can use freely available libraries to add PNG and MNG support to software you create. The libraries are under a 97 simple, non-copyleft OSI-approved free license. Read 101 PNG: The Definitive Guide by Greg Roelofs to learn how to create PNGs and write applications that use the PNG format. Burn All Gifs Graphics Visit 104 Burn All GIFs Graphics for PNG graphics you can use to show support for this site. Contact us If you haven't actually read this page, and just like GIFs or Unisys for some reason and want to tell us all about it, please don't waste your time. It feeds directly into an abuse reporting system and will not be read by a human being.
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