Burn All Gifs: An Interview With Don Marti
12/22/1999
by Edward Piou
Don Marti is the webmaster for burnallgifs.org, a site created to protest Unisys' decision to enforce its patent on LZW compression - compression that is used in the GIF images most websites use. While many commercial software vendors have paid Unisys so they can build GIF support into their own image-editing software, freeware and open-source programmers have had no success in licensing Unisys' technology.
The Burn All Gifs website advocates, among other things, converting all GIFs to a newer, more advanced, format - PNGs. In this interview, Don talks a bit about the background of the Burn All Gifs movement, and about software patents in general.
ahref: To the average web worker, it might seem that Unisys' patent on LZW compression is more complex, and more deserving of protection, than the business process patents that have cropped up recently. Leaving aside issues of the patent's real-world effects on programmers and web developers, do you see any problems with the patent itself? Should it have been granted?
Don Marti: It's an example of a patent on a pure mathematical algoritm, not on a useful invention. From the time the Constitution was ratified until the early 1980s, the law was very clear. Complete working inventions should get patents. Written works should get copyrights. Mathematical algorithms exist whether someone uses them or not, so should get neither.
Under the old law, Americans walked on the moon and built the Internet. Unfortunately, the US courts have let software patents stand -- helping to turn research and development from a productive effort to a legal quagmire.
The LZW patent was actually issued twice -- IBM holds it too. This should not have happened, but the USPTO is now spending less than one working day, on average, to review each patent application!
ahref: How successful have Burn All Gifs Day, and the website, been? How much traffic is the web site getting?
DM: I'll let the list of top referers speak for itself: http://burnallgifs.org/fans/ is a list of the sites from which we have received the most traffic.
ahref: Would you call your campaign a success so far?
DM: Yes. Enough sites have dropped GIF that the web browser vendors are now effectively forced to fix PNG support, and offer MNG support, in the next versions of their products.
ahref: PNG has been suggested as the best replacement for GIFs. What PNG problems do web developers need to be aware of? And are there any advantages PNGs have over GIFs aside from not being patent-encumbered?
DM: The web would be so much fun if it weren't for the browsers, wouldn't it? Right now, both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator have a bug in their PNG support. When displaying a PNG with transparent areas, they show transparent as black instead of correctly.
I would like to encourage all users to report this bug and insist on a fix. Netscape 5 is already fixed -- check out the mozilla.org betas if you want to see a browser that shows PNG correctly.
PNG has many technical advantages over GIF. The most important is that PNG uses 2-d instead of 1-d interlacing -- so a PNG image becomes recognizable before a GIF of the same thing. This translates directly into money if you are a web advertiser paying by the impression.
Other advantages are that PNGs can have more than 256 colors, often compress to be smaller than equivalent GIFs, can have an alpha channel instead of a single transparent color -- and more. Check out http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/ for specs.
Compuserve, which originated and popularized GIF, has declared GIF obsolete and has announced that PNG is its successor.
ahref: Do you plan on maintaining the Burn All Gifs website? And what plans do you have for it, or for your own involvement in the issue of software patents?
DM: Software patents are an accident resulting from some court mistakes in the US. I don't expect them to be around for very long after web users and companies come to understand the extent to which they have harmed innovation in information technology.
ahref: What do you think about software patents in general - should software patents never be issued? Should particular kinds of software patents never be issued?
DM: In the USA, software products are already covered by copyright, trademark, and software licenses. No other industry enjoys as generous a legal advantage as the software industry, and software patents are not necessary to encourage the industry's continued progress.
ahref: Some analysts say that software patents actually encourage innovation - that without patent protection, it would be harder for entrepreneurs to get funding from investors, and it would be easier for large corporations to steal ideas and crush small competitors. Any thoughts on this argument?
DM: Show me a small, independent software innovator who has successfully used the patent system this way, and I'll show you fifty cases where large, uncreative companies have used patents to stifle competition. Patents are now merely weapons used by corporations against each other, and real innovators suffer.
Look up software patents on the programmer site slashdot.org some time -- all the stories are about patents squashing innovators, not about innovators using patents to succeed.
The most economically useful software project of all time -- the Internet -- is entirely unpatented. Literally millions of programmers make a good living without patents.
Why should software be covered by trademark, copyright, license, and patent? No other field of endeavor has that much legal power being thrown around.
In, say, pharmaceuticals, where copyright would be useless and getting doctors and patients to sign licenses would be silly, patents may be useful to allow companies to get a return on research investments. But in software, where copyright, trademark, and licensing ALREADY cover companies' work, adding patents is turning the balance too far toward the lawyers and too far away from the genuine innovators.
ahref: If there was one thing you could've patented (keeping in mind you'd only have the patent for 20 years), what would it have been, and when?
DM: A patent only gives the holder the right to sue infringers -- and a license to be in a courtroom and in lawyer meetings for 20 years sound pretty hellish to me. Let's just keep patents out of sofware entirely, since we don't need them, and let the patent lawyers go back to the hardware companies and the drug companies. They won't starve.
How do you feel about software patents, readers? Do they limit innovation, or encourage it? Come talk about it with other web professionals.
Edward Piou is an ahref.com producer and runs ep Productions, Inc., a development company based in the Washington, D.C. area.
This site copyright 1998-1999 ep Productions, Inc. Text of any articles is copyright of the author.