[Wikipedia-l] Re: Theora and video policy...

Fri Jun 25 17:08:58 UTC 2004

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 11:51:05AM -0500, Delirium wrote:
> Peter Gervai wrote:
> 
> >Dunno about any problems with GIF *decoding*, but you surely cannot 
> >*create*
> >compressed GIFs without paying.
> > 
> >
> That's no longer true, as the GIF patent has expired everywhere except 
> Canada, where it will expire in 2 weeks.  According to the League for 
> Programming Freedom's page on the issue, expiration dates are:
> * US: June 20, 2003
> * UK, France, Germany, Italy: June 18, 2004
> * Japan: June 20, 2004
> * Canada: July 7, 2004
> 
> Once the Canadian one expires in 12 days, I see no reason to continue 
> prohibiting people from using GIFs.  Of course, whether there's any 
> advantage to GIFs over PNGs is another issue, but if we choose not to 
> use GIFs, it should be for a non-legal reason, and we should probably 
> not be anal about absolutely prohibiting them.

Thank you for this correction! I haven't followed the dates thoroughly, and
it seems that GIFs indeed have no further patent problems. 

Still I'd prefer PNG and JPEG instead of GIF, but that's completely a matter
of taste from now on.

The rest of the topic probably still valid though as most video codecs have
not expired patents (unless they expired in the meantime and me being
ignorant again).

Thanks,
Peter