Umm I dont know where you guys got the idea that GIF's where copyrighted but the GIF format was created by a team of programmers who worked for Compuserv and it's not copyrighted or owned by anyone you can verify this at
www.uspto.gov
If GIF's were copyrighted Adobe and the millions of other software titles which use's gif's sure wouldnt use or support them as it would cost money to use the format. Unisys owns a compression scheme used in gif's but due to there releasing the compression as GNU/GPL they cant charge as they were planning and this has been in a few press releases on major software publishing sites.