Is it considered safe from a patent perspective?

[StefanOltmann]

HEIC is widely acknowledged to be heavily burdened by patents.

Is it safe to integrate it into a closed-source commercial application, or is it necessary to obtain licenses for using a library to decode iPhone HEIC files?

From my observation, it seems to present significant challenges.

For instance, does the GIMP project rely on the hope that there will be no lawsuit for their usage, or do they have a legitimate basis to use it without risking legal repercussions? If so, which?

[farindk]

IANAL, but as far as I understand, when only source code is distributed, like in this repository, we are safe. When you are distributing binaries to consumers, you may be a target. How big of a target you consider yourself, you have to estimate yourself.

[StefanOltmann]

Thank you for your quick response.

I made a metadata parsing library for Kotlin Multiplatform where I wanted to include HEIC support. So you would say publishing the source code on GitHub is safe, but as soon as if I distribute binaries (JAR files, DLLs and so on) to Maven Central this makes me a target?

If I go on for actual decoding the images to bitmaps using this library I have a problem in the very moment I compile libheif to a binary and distribute it with my app?

Where do you got the „source code is safe“ from?

GIMP distributes libheif as a binary. I think I should ask them too what their view is on the legal situation.

It’s really confusing me. Thank you for your help.

[farindk]

Where do you got the „source code is safe“ from?

For example here: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13992/in-the-usa-is-it-legal-to-distribute-source-code-that-when-run-would-violate

With law, you are never safe, it is just a matter or probabiliy :-)

[StefanOltmann]

I can see now why you don’t offer prebuilt binaries. 😄

I opened a discussion on https://discourse.gnome.org/t/is-gimp-violating-heif-heic-patents/18872 and I’m curious to hear how they solved it.

Thank you :)