Charged to use jpeg and gif...

Yep, the people who originally patented .jpeg and .gif are now charging royalty fees to use the extension. Total BS.

.png, anyone?

More info:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26272.html

http://burnallgifs.org/

how will they know how uses it...spyware? hmmm kazzaa all over again, except this time in your motherboard. :(

I heard about the people considering charging fees for use of the .gif extension about a year ago. It took a long time to get it underway. But you can be sure of 2 things.
1. If they manage to enforce their copyright then those formats will die quickly
2. Because so many small image viewers like irfanview can create .gif pics, piracy will exist.
And did anybody else see that article on internet tonight about a year ago about this kind of thing? Just wondering.

Yeh, I saw it then. It just got refreshed in my memory recently by a post a compadr'e of mine made on another board, and I figured I'd let some people know. I agree that it'll definitely either kill off the use of the formats, or major piracy will go on. I personally think this is BS... everyone is in it for the money these days, and that's sad. :-/

I thought JPEG stood for the Joint Picture somethingorother Group... Uhm... <quick look up> Joint Photographic Experts Group. I suspect that the company just somehow acquired the rights through getting The Dumb US Patent Office to approve some tricky patent. I expect them to (justly) die horribly (corporately speaking).

Dat chit be scary...think I'll go patent me some air and develop a license scheme of my own....

I wish they would develop a truly great file extension though, something with really good compression that would be really useful. Something that can work well, is small, incorporate animation and that kind of thing. After all, if the 2 most used image formats are going to die out, then make a really good one.

What I don't understand is, if we are paying good money for graphics editting products (PhotoShop and the like) then this should be your license to produce/publish images with this compression.

Is this not the case ??

Hmm.... Unisys all overagin !!!

I got a file extension for all the people who want to copyright .gif and .jpg. its called,
.faq

this is insane. so .png is the way to go, but doesnt hold the clarity that .jpeg does. .tif will work if you want the clarity, but it is very large. whats next? M$ charging for .doc/.xls/.etc
and will it be just .jpeg or .jpg included? im not sure if there is much of a distinction.