# The GIF Is on Its Deathbed - The Atlantic

<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/using-reaction-gifs-over-tumblr-giphy/671680/>

- Host: [theatlantic.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/theatlantic.com/)
- Saved: October 11, 2022 (2022-10-11T21:53:37Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/403a229daaba/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/403a229daaba.json

## What Jamie wrote

It dates me, but I was a little surprised that this article made no mention of the patent battles that Unisys tried to assert regarding GIF. They had their lawyers all over at the beginning of the web trying to get everyone to pay a royalty. At BigCharts we served charts as GIFs, and they came knocking on our door. I’m still proud of my reply. Their patent covered the compressing and decompressing of GIFs. We never decompressed, so I suggested we didn’t violate their patent. It worked well enough to get them to move along to other people. 

It is also fun to see Matt Semke, aka [Cats Will Eat You](https://catswilleatyou.com) quoted here. He is a notable local artist and has created a new piece of art every day for more than 15 years. 🤩

> GIFs—as a file format, not as a category of thing you could use to express an opinion without formulating one—were special. “This was an art form that was native to the internet,” Matt Semke, a GIF artist who works under the name Cats Will Eat You, told me. “Videos existed in other places; paintings, photos existed in other places. GIFs just didn’t exist anywhere until the internet.” And they were beloved because of the seamless animated loop, which was not possible with any other file format. Because of their unwieldiness and antiquation, today, many GIFs are converted to MP4 video files, which look good and make life easier but do not loop perfectly. There is always a tiny hiccup when the video has to restart, making them inferior.

Is it possible that GIFs are the vinyl record of the Internet? Not as convenient, not as fast, not as smooth — but so what!?

Forever is a really big word, but I would feel very confident saying that GIF is a file format that will be around forever.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT230: Weekly Thing #230 / Calendar, Fractal, Reminiscing](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/230/), Notable

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/using-reaction-gifs-over-tumblr-giphy/671680/