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.

The Free Software Foundation has some good stuff on copyrights and why they only use PNG on their website(s), and is on the philosophy page:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html

which in my opinion, is a great read. And as for the JPEG extension, wow! I knew it was too good to be true. Is there an open source alternative to JPEG? I am gonna do some research on that....

Thanks for the heads up, man :)

Kind of amusing really. It was really kind of foreseen some time ago. My question is this:
Are they going to persue royalties from every joe out there that runs a simple personal site through geocities and what not? Or, are they just going to push the royalties on to the developers that allow their software to view and/or manipulate the jpg's thus increasing the software viewer/editor fees?
If the average joe sees the cost of his favorite image viewer editor going up in price, he may look to alternative means of acquiring the software, or finding the alternate image format (.png)

How very amusing and yet very appalling all at the same time.

People will try anything for money, wont they?

Charging royalty fees to use these extensions, is like charging people to use letters from the alphabet.

Heh, nice analogy. It's not quite the same, hehe, but that puts it into perspective for some others. :)

Not charging for use of something fundamental to a community such as the net would be "UnAmerican".

*note for you mildly less perceptive people, the above is known as sarcasm. ;-)

Seems to me that there would be at least a few people out there that know enough about .jpg and other image formats to make a new 1 that would be close to jpeg without too much trouble. And how many people would actually pay for it anyway, even if people don't want to pirate it, most internet users will have no clue and just use it anyway. It would probably work about as well as the music industry trying to keep people from trading mp3's.

Apparently these people are NOT the original patenters of the JPG format.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26296.html

whats going to stop people renaming the file extention to something else? it will still have the same compression but in just another name even if this does go through how will they enforce it?

I'm waiting for the day you have to pay $500. for microsoft office, and then $.50 for each file you create. The fifty cents will be the fee for using their file extension.

firstly ive come to notice that theregister.co.uk is more of a conspiracy page than real news. but its been a while sence ive checked, secondly i saw a similar story on the humorix webpage....... my guess is that its just a joke and not really happening. ill belive it when i see it and ill be laugphing at all of you who havent discovered the joy of ping files!

on a retort, ping files use a lossless compression algorithim, therefor they loose no data in compression link jpeg does. i do admit that jpeg has a good compression algorithim but its not lossless therefor will never be on the same level as ping files.

I don't think this would work on a website but, if this actually happens, couldn't everyone just add a file type of extension .whatever and have their computer interpret them as .gifs?
As for websites, well, I'm sure as Hell not going back to bitmaps :D