Charged to use jpeg and gif...

[alittlebitnumb]

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

[chefer]

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.

[Gurl]

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.

[jehnx]

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

[indolent]

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. ;-)

[Magus255]

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.

[Terr]

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

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

[lench]

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?

[Joey_Batch_File]

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.

[LoggOff]

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.