What Was the Burn All GIFs Campaign?

The "Burn All GIFs" campaign was an online protest launched on November 5, 1999, by the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) against the technology corporation Unisys. The movement arose after Unisys began aggressively enforcing its patent on the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) data compression algorithm, which powered the widely used Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). Threatened by unexpected licensing fees and legal liability for creating or hosting GIF images, software developers and webmasters rallied to purge the format from the internet, directly accelerating the adoption of patent-free alternatives like the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.

In 1987, CompuServe introduced the GIF format to allow fast transmission of color raster images across online networks. CompuServe utilized LZW compression without realizing that Sperry Corporation—which merged with Burroughs in 1986 to form Unisys—had patented the algorithm in 1983. For years, GIF was treated as a de facto open standard across the emerging World Wide Web, supported by all major browsers and imaging tools.

Tensions erupted in late December 1994 when Unisys and CompuServe jointly announced that commercial software developers implementing GIF would have to pay licensing royalties. The announcement caused widespread panic and anger across the tech community. The dispute escalated further in August 1999, when Unisys announced that even non-commercial and private websites using unlicensed GIF images could be subject to a $5,000 licensing fee if the software that produced the images had not paid royalties to Unisys.

Faced with legal threats over basic digital media, the League for Programming Freedom declared November 5, 1999, as "Burn All GIFs Day." The protest encouraged internet users and website owners to delete all GIF files from their servers, replace them with patent-free alternatives, and demonstrate against software patents outside Unisys offices.

The campaign served as the primary catalyst for the widespread adoption of the PNG format. Development of PNG had started in 1995 as a direct response to Unisys's first licensing announcement, designed specifically to be completely patent-free and technically superior to GIF in color depth and compression.

The controversy gradually subsided as Unisys's patents expired: the United States patent lapsed in June 2003, followed by corresponding European, Japanese, and Canadian patents in 2004. Once free of patent restrictions, the GIF format persisted into the modern web era primarily due to its universal support for short, looping animations. However, the "Burn All GIFs" campaign remains one of the most prominent early grass-roots movements highlighting the conflict between proprietary software patents and the open architecture of the internet.