It would seem that CineForm is inherently simple, so perhaps it does not infringe on any of the "more clever" codec's inventions (AKA patents). I imagine GoPro ran it through legal before doing this.
Was the idea. CineForm was developed to avoid patents in 2001, by using technology that patents had already expired: 2-6 blockless wavelets, RLE and Huffman entropy encoding -- this is about that is used to make CineForm. Simplicity is what drove performance, wavelets over DCT is what helps in quality.The patent mind-field is in distribution codecs that strive for the lowest possible bit-rate, which was not a design goal for CineForm. Declaimer: I'm the author of the linked article.