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