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I thought you said PNG was patent-free–what about Stac, PKWARE, Apple, etc.?

April 26, 2017Apple pkware PNG said stac

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I thought you said PNG was patent-free–what about Stac, PKWARE, Apple, etc.?

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The PNG image format was designed in 1995 specifically in response to the patent problems with the LZW algorithm used in GIF. To the best of the PNG group’s knowledge, PNG was then–and still is–completely patent-free. However, the fact that is possible to implement PNG without infringing any known patents certainly does not imply that it is impossible to implement it in a manner that does infringe one or more patents.