Z:gnu-www-ja-danger-of-software-patents--cef6c5-But I noticed that users rarel/en

But I noticed that users rarely ask their printers to compress things. Generally the only thing they want their printers to do is to uncompress; and I also noticed that both of the patents on the LZW algorithm were written in such a way that if your system can only uncompress, it's not forbidden. These patents were written so that they covered compression, and they had other claims covering both compression and uncompression; but there was no claim covering only uncompression. So I realized that if we implement only the uncompression for LZW, we would be safe. And although it would not satisfy the specification, it would please the users sufficiently; it would do what they actually needed. So that's how we barely squeaked by avoiding the two patents.