No. And, yes, long since expired. UniSys held the patent, CompuServe was the victim (and the actual innovator, since they invented the GIF format, which happened to use Limpel Ziv...it was a submarine patent for many years until GIFs were pervasive; very nasty business).
Ah so I guess compuserve made gif popular, that is why I associate them with the story.
Careful now, GIF uses Lempel-Ziv-Welch or LZW, which was patent encumbered in the US until 2003, and a few other countries until 2004. Not all Lempel-Ziv compression algorithms were patent encumbered though: LZ77 with Huffman coding is the DEFLATE algorithm which is very widely used, since that's the algorithm used in PKZIP/gzip/zlib.