Patent 7492290 was granted and assigned to Red Hat on February, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A data processing method where a source bit stream is manipulated to produce four intermediate streams: flag bits, literals, offsets and lengths. Flag bits are grouped into multi-bit units, and an output stream containing flag units, literals, offsets and lengths is emitted. The output stream occupies fewer bits than the source bit stream, but encodes all the data of the source bit stream.