The future of the world’s most popular graphics image format, the .GIF Graphics Interchange Format, is in doubt following a patent claim from Unisys Corp. The file format uses the Lempel-Ziv & Welch compression technique to keep file sizes down, and falls foul of Unisys’s US patent 4,558,302. Unisys’s intention to collect from developers supporting the GIF standard emerged on December 28 when Compuserve announced that it had taken a licence and was offering a sub-licence to developers building Compuserve add-ons. Unisys’s Welch published his techniques in an engineering journal in the early 1980s where it was picked up and implemented by a number of companies including Compuserve. The on-line service operator was trying to build and promote a free, machine-independent graphics standard. .GIF has become a lingua franca for people needing to exchange 256-bit colour graphics files, is the graphics types that most World Wide Web browsers interpret as default and there is hardly a desktop graphics package that does not include reading and writing .GIFs among its functions. The Compuserve sub-licence is only available for developers whose products are primarily used with data originating from the Compuserve system; all other developers will have to negotiate with Unisys on an individual basis and there is no set fee. Compuserve sub-licensees will have to pay Compuserve a one-time $1, most of which goes to Unisys, and for each piece of software sold, the author has to pay either 1.5% of the selling price or 15 cents, whichever is the greater. Compuserve believes this deal is better than an deal that the authors will be able to strike with Unisys direct. The agreement appears to preclude shareware authors allowing people to try out the software for a period before buying it. The Unisys algorithm is used in a number of other file standards, including the TIFF Tagged Image File Format, and most developers are vowing to adopt a genuinely free standard to avoid paying royalties. The row has generated plenty of bad publicity for Unisys, with the company being characterised as a dying one desperately casting around for assets on which it can raise a little money – the move is a grab by Unisys to get money from the information superhighway to prop up a failing company, Pat Clawson, president of on-line software developer TeleGrafix Communications Inc declared to Dow Jones & Co.
