We all use GIFs freely and indiscriminately while texting our friends and family, but did you know that GIFs could have become paid at one time. Yes, GIFs are free to use and can be pulled from multiple sources like Tenor or Giphy, but in the 1990s, 'Unisys,' the company which owned the patent for the GIF format, began charging a fee for using GIFs. User would have had to pay every time they wanted to use a GIF. The company later had to withdraw the fee and make GIFs free when PNG emerged as a free alternative for GIFs. Further, the creators of the PNG format wanted it to be called Ping! Thankfully, both GIFs and PNGs remain free to use today.
