Mistaken ? In 1999 Unisys stated that its policy is
to require
a $5000 fee from websites that carry GIF images made by unlicensed
software -- even nonprofit websites created and displayed with free
software. Can Wikipedia prove that every GIF image uploaded to it
has been created by a properly licensed GIF encoder ? I think not.
Unisys can claim any damn thing it wants. But it's what the law
says that matters, and the law says that Unisys is just blowing
smoke up our ass on that claim. Only the claim on encoding software
has any legal merit.
Again, I'm not averse to excluding GIFs from Wikipedia for many
reasons, but fear of a legitimate patent infringement claim is
not one of them.0