Somebody puts a licence under an image format every few years, and everybody else starts converting. Convertio runs its heic to jpg conversion entirely on its own servers, taking a file of up to 1 GB and handing back a JPEG that opens on any device with nothing installed locally.
The League for Programming Freedom called for Burn All GIFs Day on 5 November 1999, at the Unisys headquarters, where GIF users would gather and burn their files. Unisys had a patent lawyer named Mark Starr, and The Industry Standard quoted him on 25 April 2000. "They want everything to be free and let's all be friends," he said. "But fortunately, this is not the American way."
The patent expired in the United States on 20 June 2003. Canada followed on 7 July 2004. The United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expired on 18 June 2004, and Japan on 20 June 2004. PNG had by then been in every browser for years, and the format it was built to replace is still in every chat client.
Then somebody did it again, with JPEG
In July 2002 The Register noticed that a Texan video conferencing company was asking for royalties on JPEG. Forgent Networks had bought the patent five years earlier and wanted back royalties from anything that could receive a JPEG image: digital cameras, PDAs, phones, scanners and web browsers. Two companies had already paid, one of them Sony, and one unnamed licensee had paid fifteen million dollars.
US Patent 4,698,672 was filed on 27 October 1986 by Wen-Hsiung Chen and Daniel J. Klenke under the title "Coding system for reducing redundancy", granted on 6 October 1987, and reached Forgent a decade later when it bought Compression Labs, the San Jose company named on it as the assignee. Its own abstract says the invention is "useful in video compression systems", which is what a court decided nineteen years afterwards. The application number was 923,630, the document lists 46 claims and four drawing figures, and the examiner was Howard W. Britton. Forgent itself was based in Austin and made most of its money from licensing rather than from products. Over three years it brought in more than a hundred and ten million dollars in settlements and licence fees. Forgent sued forty-four companies. Fifteen of them settled, Yahoo among them. In June 2006 a court ruled that the patent covered video and not still images, which removed most of what the claim had been worth. In November Forgent settled with Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Sun in the district court in San Francisco, for eight million dollars.
The patent expired the month before that settlement, in October 2006, though Forgent could still have pursued claims retroactively. Its chairman, Richard Snyder, said the company was satisfied with the resolution of the matter.
Contents
- The bill that made people want to burn files
- What a converter actually does with the file
- The format on your phone
- The answer the industry gave, thirty years later
The bill that made people want to burn files
On 29 December 1994 CompuServe announced a developer agreement with Unisys under which anyone writing software that read or wrote a GIF owed a one-dollar licence and a royalty of 1.5 percent of the program's price, or fifteen cents a copy, whichever came out greater, with a deadline of 31 January 1995 to sign. The patent covered LZW, the compression method Bob Berry had chosen for GIF in 1987: Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel published the underlying algorithms in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in 1977 and 1978, Terry Welch described his faster variant in the June 1984 issue of IEEE Computer while at Sperry, and Sperry became Unisys, so the patent followed the company rather than the papers. In July 1999 Unisys went further and began applying it to websites that served GIF images rather than only to the software that produced them, and Slashdot wrote up its intentions on 31 August 1999.
What a converter actually does with the file
JPG was released on 18 September 1992 by the Joint Photographic Experts Group and is supported on every device, browser and operating system in use, which is the entire reason the conversion exists. HEIC is the opposite case: it carries HEVC, which achieves roughly 50 percent better compression than JPEG at the same visual quality, and it sits in an ISOBMFF container that can hold a Live Photo, a burst sequence, a depth map from a dual-camera system and an HDR gain map in the same file. Server-side libraries decode exactly one frame of that, with GD and Imagick taking the first and ignoring the rest, and WordPress deliberately collapsing an uploaded sequence to a single frame rather than pretending otherwise.
Convertio runs the conversion on remote servers rather than in the browser, which is why a phone or a laptop stays responsive while a batch is being processed, and files arrive from a computer, Google Drive, Dropbox or a URL, or by being dragged onto the page. Several HEIC photos can go up at once and come back as JPGs in a single session, which matters more than it sounds when a folder holds three hundred of them.
The page states that uploaded HEIC files are deleted immediately after conversion and that the JPG results are purged from the servers within 24 hours, which is the line worth reading before a batch of screenshots from an internal system goes anywhere near a browser tab.
Nothing has to be installed for any of it, and the same page handles more than 200 output formats besides JPG, so the answer to the next format that turns up is already on it. Basic conversions are free, the paid plans exist for larger uploads and faster processing, and the page carries a quality rating of 4.8 from 473,433 votes.
Without an account a single file can be 100 MB, two conversions can run at once, and there are ten conversion minutes in any twenty-four hours; the paid plans start at $11.99 a month, raise the ceiling to 1 GB and count conversion credits instead of minutes, with most photo and document jobs costing one credit each. Everything moves over SSL with HSTS enabled, and an output file is bound to the IP that started the conversion, so the person who uploaded it is the only one who can collect it. The terms also say plainly that no refunds are issued once a subscription is bought, which is the kind of sentence worth reading before the card goes in rather than after.
JPG carries the vast majority of photographic content across the web, in email, on social media and in digital archives, and a JPEG opens on every device, browser and operating system without anyone being asked to install a decoder or agree to anything. Both formats use lossy compression, so a conversion set to high quality leaves a difference most people will not see on an everyday photo, and what is actually lost is the extra material the container was carrying: the second frame of a Live Photo, the burst, the depth map, the HDR gain map. For a photograph headed into a ticket, a pull request or an archive, none of that was ever going to survive the journey anyway.
The format on your phone
HEIF was standardised as ISO/IEC 23008-12 in 2015, and the container came from Nokia, whose engineers worked out in 2012 that HEVC would compress still images well, and Apple switched it on by default in iOS 11 in 2017 with its own announcement that June putting the saving at up to 40 percent on a photo. HEVC itself had been approved as a standard on 13 April 2013 and compresses between 25 and 50 percent better than the codec before it, and Apple's iPhone 7 and every model after it have been shooting in it since iOS 11. The container underneath both of them, ISOBMFF, was given a Technology & Engineering Emmy by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences on 4 November 2021.
That licensing runs through three separate pools rather than one, and they arrived one at a time — MPEG LA in September 2014, HEVC Advance in March 2015 and Velos Media in March 2017 — and MPEG LA had published its own HEVC terms two years before HEVC Advance existed. In July 2015 HEVC Advance asked for up to $2.60 per device and, on top of that, half a percent of the revenue a company made from content, and the terms were described at the time as unreasonable and greedy. In November 2016 the same pool made software distribution on phones and PCs royalty-free.
Safari could play HEVC in 2017, the year Apple made it the camera default, while Chrome did not get hardware decoding until version 107 shipped on 25 October 2022 and Firefox on Android reached it only in version 137, in April 2025. On Windows the same gap shows up in the Photos app, which asks for the HEVC Video Extensions when a .heic is opened and those cost 99 cents in the Microsoft Store, and the free version listed as coming from the device manufacturer no longer works on Windows 11, so a great many people install VLC instead and stop thinking about it. Apple's iPhone 7 and every model after it have been shooting in HEIC since iOS 11, so the gap has been open for eight years and counting.
None of this stops the phone producing the files, and there are exactly two switches that change it:
- Settings, then Camera, then Formats, then Most Compatible, which puts the camera back to JPEG and H.264
- Settings, then Photos, then Transfer to Mac or PC, which decides whether the phone converts on the way out
Apple's own support threads are full of people reporting that on newer versions the second one does not reliably do what it says.
The answer the industry gave, thirty years later
The reply to the licence on GIF was a replacement format drafted on a newsgroup in January 1995 and the reply to the licence on HEVC was a company registration: the Alliance for Open Media was founded in September 2015 by Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix for reasons that had to do with licensing rather than compression, its codec AV1 was finished in 2018, and by December 2025 Netflix was serving 30 percent of its streams with it. There is an older version of the same trick in which Cisco has paid the royalties on its OpenH264 binaries since 2013 so that anyone can download them and Firefox has shipped those binaries since version 33 in 2014 when the operating system does not provide H.264 itself.
AVIF version 1.0.0 was published on 19 February 2019 and the interesting part is what it sits on, because a valid AVIF file is a valid HEIF file: it uses the same container Nokia designed, the same one an iPhone writes into, with a payload nobody has to license, and it reached version 1.2.0 of the specification without changing that.
In 1995 people converted GIF to PNG because a licence had appeared underneath the format, and in 2026 people convert HEIC to JPEG because the decoder is not installed, or costs a dollar, or sits behind a pool agreement that nobody in the room has read. In 1994 the bill went to the developer at one dollar and fifteen cents a copy; in 2026 the HEVC extension on Windows costs 99 cents and the phone does not mention it.
Top comments (0)