Re^2: perloin (v)

[tford]

"It makes me think of the horrible idea of software patents."

I often wonder, whenever I open an Adobe product and notice that text on the info block that says "Contains an implementation of the LZW algorithm," if there's some set of intellectual property laws regarding algorithms and software that I should be aware of...

[zentara]

From what I remember from the gif-lzw problem , the writers of the software that use it are responsible to pay any royalties, the end user is not. And there are leeways for free software too, like if you write a Perl program that used lzw, but don't charge for it, no problem.