[Magick-announce] ImageMagick & LZW

[shrike at studio.imagemagick.org]

June 20, 2003--the US patent on LZW compression expires today.  However,
our situation is unchanged:  LZW compression is patented in some countries,
and since we have mirrors in some of those countries, and since we
don't have the ability to block downloads from a particular countries,
we will will not be enabling LZW compression in the binaries that we
supply until all patents have expired, i.e., after July 7, 2004.

If you are using ImageMagick in the USA, you may now rebuild your own
copy from source, using the configuration flag --enable-lzw, without
infringing on the Unisys LZW patent.