Unisys Enforces the LZW Patent

DEC 28 1994 · 12:00

A flame GIF in the spirit of the Burn All GIFs campaign that the Unisys LZW enforcement announcement ignited in the week between Christmas and New Year 1994. Place: Unisys Corporation press release, Blue Bell, Pennsylvania Figures: Unisys legal department · the shareware authors who read CompuServe forums that week · Greg Roelofs and the nascent PNG working group Unisys, the merger-successor to Sperry, has owned the LZW patent (see [[lzw-patent-1985]]) since 1986. For eight years it does not enforce against GIF software. On 28 December 1994, in a press release timed for the week between Christmas and New Year, Unisys announces it will begin enforcing the patent against commercial software that creates or displays GIFs. The license fees: nominal for IBM and Adobe, ruinous for shareware authors charging $20 per copy. The announcement reaches the public web through CompuServe forum posts the same week, then through the comp.graphics Usenet groups, then through every webmaster mailing list. The reaction is immediate and uniform: PANIC, then ORGANIZED RESPONSE. Video: Stallman lays out the case against software patents using the LZW saga as one of his canonical examples.