Unisys Enforcing GIF Patents

ESR writes "Remember the flap back in 1994-1995 about the GIF format, with Unisys behaving like jerks over the LZW compression method and threatening to charge license fees for use of their bogus patent? Well, brace yourselves. It just got worse. Under Unisys's new policy, they've gone beyond shaking down software authors. They're now threatening to sue even noncommercial websites that carry GIFs for a $5000 license fee, regardless of whether the GIFs were generated by licensed software or not. The gory details are at Don Marti's Burn All GIFs Day site. Time to convert all your GIFs to some other format. I like PNG better than JPEG, as it's lossless. The PNG site carries a gif2png tool that does a good job; I just used it to clean up my personal website. GIF animations won't survive the conversion, however...uh, wait. Maybe Unisys just did us a favor after all... " Here is the Unisys page that started it all.