Proprietary format

A proprietary format is a file format where the mode of presentation of its data is the intellectual property of an individual or organization which asserts ownership over the format. In contrast, a free format is a format that is either not recognized as intellectual property, or has had all claimants to its intellectual property release claims of ownership. Proprietary formats can be either open if they are published, or closed, if they are considered trade secrets. In contrast, a free format is never closed.

Proprietary formats are typically controlled by a private person or organization for the benefit of its applications, protected with patents or as trade secrets, and intended to give the license holder exclusive control of the technology to the (current or future) exclusion of others.^[1] Typically such restrictions attempt to prevent reverse engineering, though reverse engineering of file formats for the purposes of interoperability is generally believed to be legal by those who practice it. Legal positions differ according to each country's laws related to, among other things, software patents.

Contents 1 Privacy, ownership, risk and freedom 2 Prominent proprietary formats 2.1 Open Proprietary Formats 2.2 Closed Proprietary Formats 2.3 Controversial 2.4 Formerly proprietary 3 See also 4 References

Privacy, ownership, risk and freedom

One of the contentious issues surrounding the use of proprietary formats is that of ownership of created content. If the information is stored in a way which the user's software provider tries to keep secret, the user may own the information by virtue of having created it, but they have no way to retrieve it except by using a version of the original software which produced the file. Without a standard file format or reverse engineered converters, users cannot share data with people using competing software. The fact that the user depends on a particular brand of software to retrieve the information stored in a proprietary format files increases barriers of entry for competing software and may contribute to vendor lock-in concept.

The issue of risk comes about because proprietary formats are less likely to be publicly documented and therefore less future proof.^[2] If the software firm owning right to that format stops making software which can read it then those who had used the format in the past may lose all information in those files. This is particularly common with formats that were not widely adopted. However, even ubiquitous formats such as Microsoft Word can not be fully reverse-engineered.

Prominent proprietary formats

In alphabetical order:

Open Proprietary Formats

• AAC — an open standard, but owned by Via Licensing ^[3]
• GEDCOM — an open specification for genealogy data exchange, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• MP3 — an open standard, but subject to patents in some countries ^[4]

Closed Proprietary Formats

• CDR — (non-documented) CorelDraw's native format primarily used for vector graphic drawings
• DWG — (non-documented) AutoCAD drawing
• PSD — (non-documented) Adobe Photoshop's native image format
• RAR — (partially documented) archive and compression file format owned by Alexander L. Roshal^[5]
• WMA — a closed format, owned by Microsoft^[6]

Controversial

• DOC — Microsoft Word Document (formerly closed/undocumented, now Microsoft Open Specification Promise)
• XLS — Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file format (formerly closed/undocumented, now Microsoft Open Specification Promise)
• PPT — Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation file format (formerly closed/undocumented, now Microsoft Open Specification Promise)
• RTF — a formatted text format (proprietary^{[7][8][9][10]}, published specification, defined and maintained only by Microsoft)
• SWF — Adobe Flash format (formerly closed/undocumented, now partially or completely open)
• XFA — Adobe XML Forms Architecture, used in PDF files (published specification, but not included in the PDF ISO 32000-1 standard; controlled and maintained only by Adobe^[11][12])
• ZIP — a base version of this data compression and archive file format is in the public domain, but newer versions have some patented features^[13][14][15]

Formerly proprietary

• GIF — CompuServe's Graphics Interchange Format (open since 2004)
• PDF — Adobe's Portable Document Format (open since 2008), but the specification allows some proprietary extensions

See also

• Open format

References