This translates directly into money if you are a web advertiser paying by the impression. Compuserve, which originated and popularized GIF, has declared GIF obsolete and has announced that PNG is its successor. I don't expect them to be around for very long after web users and companies come to understand the extent to which they have harmed innovation in information technology. In the USA, software products are already covered by copyright, trademark, and software licenses. No other industry enjoys as generous a legal advantage as the software industry, and software patents are not necessary to encourage the industry's continued progress.
Patents are now merely weapons used by corporations against each other, and real innovators suffer.
Literally millions of programmers make a good living without patents. No other field of endeavor has that much legal power being thrown around. In, say, pharmaceuticals, where copyright would be useless and getting doctors and patients to sign licenses would be silly, patents may be useful to allow companies to get a return on research investments. Let's just keep patents out of sofware entirely, since we don't need them, and let the patent lawyers go back to the hardware companies and the drug companies. They won't starve.