LZW was claimed by Unisys for many years. It wasn't Ziv's fault, it wasn't even Welch's, but it does highlight that compression has historically been a garbage fire of patent harassment. I certainly think it has held the field back.
The patent harassment might even be a factor in the curiosity mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that a lot of practical progress in file compression has been published in a Russian web forum.
I personally wrote an implementation of lzw in Assembly in my late teens. It could deal with gifs... that was before 1999, when
Unisys[0] claimed the patent (for all kind of uses) and had the patent for many a year, PNG was created not to use lzw since it was patented. The algorithm was patented for the encoding part but not decoding.
Still not at all relevant to this case. Algorithms have no such gate keeping because there is no barrier to entry. Algo developers aren’t fighting for some tiny pot of NSF money allocated to particle physics to build a 100 million dollar algorithm detector.
This is only partially true. A great example is Arithmetic coding in compression where research pretty much stalled for almost 40 years (from the mid 1970s until the 2010s) due to patent concerns.
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A bit tone deaf considering the thread is about algorithms that are open.
LZW was claimed by Unisys for many years. It wasn't Ziv's fault, it wasn't even Welch's, but it does highlight that compression has historically been a garbage fire of patent harassment. I certainly think it has held the field back.
The patent harassment might even be a factor in the curiosity mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that a lot of practical progress in file compression has been published in a Russian web forum.
Well, plenty of compression algorithms have been patented or attempted to be patented - e.g. arithmetic codes and Microsoft's rANS patent
I personally wrote an implementation of lzw in Assembly in my late teens. It could deal with gifs... that was before 1999, when
Unisys[0] claimed the patent (for all kind of uses) and had the patent for many a year, PNG was created not to use lzw since it was patented. The algorithm was patented for the encoding part but not decoding.
[0]: https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...
Plenty of things are totally open, yet innovation is still directed by the inventor.
Still not at all relevant to this case. Algorithms have no such gate keeping because there is no barrier to entry. Algo developers aren’t fighting for some tiny pot of NSF money allocated to particle physics to build a 100 million dollar algorithm detector.
This is only partially true. A great example is Arithmetic coding in compression where research pretty much stalled for almost 40 years (from the mid 1970s until the 2010s) due to patent concerns.