🚀 go-pugleaf

ObDisclaimer:  I speak for myself, not for the company.  After all,
would you let me speak for you?  God I hope not.  I get in enough
trouble speaking for myself.

Terry Leroux (tleroux@infinet.com) wrote:
: Al Lipscomb (arl@news.IntNet.net) wrote:
: : Lets also look at Compuserve in all this. They could have elected to bear
: : the cost of the license themselves. They are after all the ones who
: : brought the GIF format to its present status. When Microsoft lost the
: : Stacker litigation they did not pass the cost on to their customers (and
: : I do not like Microsoft). Compuserve could have purchased a license for
: : all applications using the LZW algorithum in relation to the GIF
: : specification. They instead elected to pass the cost on.

: That's odd, I thought for sure what I had seen from Unisys implied that
: they were looking for a royalty for every unit sold. How does CompuServe
: find out how many copies of every program that compresses or decompresses
: Gif files are sold. (Add to that they are going to also have to track the
: selling price, since it seems Unisys is dealing with the greater of a
: flat fee and a percentage of the selling price.)
: Could you honestly say that if you were in charge of CompuServe, that you
: would pay royalties to Unisys for AOL's and Prodigy's use of the GIF
: standard? As the head of CompuServe, you freely made available a standard
: that all these people made money off of (since Unisys is aparantly not
: going to charge licensing fees for freeware). While using this standard
: they paid you no fees even though they profited, and now that Unisys
: wants licensing fees your going to pay for everyone else? Why do I find
: that unbelievable?

Woah.  You're way off base here.  Let's go back for a second and see
if we can straighten this out:

1)  Unisys holds the patent on the LZW compression technique
2)  Compuserve developed the GIF standard and uses it extensively to
    have their users access CIS.

Now, the only licensing fee you have to pay Compuserve is whenever you
purchase something from them to access CIS.  Compuserve couldn't care
less about programs which generate or view GIF images.  An independent
individual who is developing a GIF viewer would have to go to Unisys
independently of Compuserve and get a license.

So Compuserve doesn't have to bear the brunt AOL and Prodigy using GIF
images.  AOL and Prodigy have to purchase licenses from Unisys as well
to sell any products which generate or view GIF images.

As it stands now, the additional 1.5% "licensing fee" that goes on top
of anything one buys from Compuserve goes into paying the 1% licensing
fee that goes back to Unisys.

I hope this makes sense now.  I'm not familiar enough with Compuserve
to know exactly what they sell that is affected by the licensing
agreement.  I've never even used Compuserve.

--
Matt Smith  -  msmith@unislc.slc.unisys.com
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~msmith/home.html
"Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!" -- The Tick