The web in 1999 was a lot smaller than it is today, so a lot of people don’t remember what happened back when Unisys decided to start to enforce their GIF-related patents. GIF was already widely used on the web as a fundamental web technology. Much like the codecs we’re talking about today it wasn’t in any particular spec but thanks to network effects it was in use basically everywhere.
Unisys was asking some web site owners $5,000-$7,500 to able to use GIFs on their sites.
very true, christopher blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web