Fugitive From Justice
By Lincoln D. Stein
According to the Unisys Corporation, I'm a fugitive from justice. A rogue Webmaster. A flaunter of national and international treaties. My Web site uses (gasp!) GIF images.
Chances are that you're a fugitive, too.
Most readers have heard about the GIF controversy. During the early days of the Web, the CompuServe graphics interchange format (GIF) became the dominant way to put graphics on Web pages. This was due in part to the GIF format's ability to compress 256-color graphics in a lossless fashion, making the resulting files small and easy to transport. A more important factor in GIF's rise to fame, however, was CompuServe's forward-thinking publication of the GIF format as an open standard, and the wide availability of GIF encoder and decoder example code. Support for GIF was built in to many commercial products, and to a large number of freeware products, too. Then Marc Andreessen built GIF decoding and rendering in to Mosaic, and the rest is history.
A New Year's Surprise
At first the GIF story looked like a triumph for the nascent Open Source movement. Then the other shoe dropped. The Unisys Corporation, which holds the patent on the Lempel-Ziv Welch (LZW) compression algorithm, noticed that CompuServe's published GIF specification was built around the LZW algorithm. CompuServe, unaware that the widely published LZW compression system was under patent protection, had failed to obtain a license for the use of this technology. Not good. Unisys' lawyers talked to CompuServe's lawyers, and an agreement was hammered out, the results of which were announced in a press release issued on New Year's day, 1995.
