legal issues with modifying gif images directly?

[xblue]

Hi,

my latest project involves dynamic image manipulation of animated gifs.

I understand that a license is needed to create gifs, and imagemagick does have it while the gd library does not, and therefore they don't process gif formats anymore.

However, my cheap host doesn't support imagemagick, so I thought about trying to solve it by directly hex-editing the gif.

What do you think, would that violate their license as well?

🙁 cannot afford to be sued...
xblue

[Arc]

You have to have a liscence to create a gif? lol that's the first i've heard of that....

[xblue]

I do not mean that you need a license when you use some graphic program to create a gif, the point is that the software needs it.

http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/

http://www.google.com/search?q=gif+license+unisys
(roughly 12,000 results - quite a lot to read 😃)

The point is: I understand that if I distributed the tool (in other words the php code) that creates these gifs, I'd probably need a license, but I'm still not sure if this applies if I only serve the gifs.

[xblue]

I still seem to have been slighty wrong with what I wrote. The patent does not cover the gif format, only the compression algorithm used for gif (and others).

Thus, since I don't deal with compression at all, but only modify already compressed files, I think I should be on the safe side.

[Sxooter]

Can pngs fill your need?

[xblue]

no, png doesn't allow animation, and more complex animation formats like swf seem overkill since it is a really tiny and basic animation. but thanks a lot for answering.

[Sxooter]

There is a standard for animated pngs, called mngs, but I don't think libgd supports them, and I'm pretty sure most browsers don't.