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Nowadays, we have videos and flash players to make out web surfing time more entertaining. However, back in the old days (pre 2000), animated gifs were quite a rage as they looked really cute once you can get them to move. But as the GIF patent war rage on, it got sucked into the vortex of legal complexity. Now this one comes directly from Slashdot (and FSM), it seems that the last of Unisys’ GIF patents have finally expired. But has Unisys cool down on this whole matter yet ?

The GNU web site has a page on the GIF format. At the bottom of the page, you can see:

1. We were able to search the patent databases of the USA, Canada, Japan, and the European Union. The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it expired on 18 June 2004, in Japan the patent expired on 20 June 2004 and in Canada it expired on 7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM patent expired 11 August 2006, The Software Freedom Law Center says that after 1 October 2006, there will be no significant patent claims interfering with employment of the GIF format.

But on Unisys LZW page it says:

Unisys Corporation holds and has patents pending on a number of improvements on the inventions claimed in the above-expired patents. Information on these improvement patents and terms under which they may be licensed can be obtained by contacting the following: […]