[danbmil99]

That's exactly right. While it is impossible to absolutely prove a negative (that no one will make a credible patent claim against AV1) -- it's worth noting that the line of codecs starting with VP3 that led up to AV1 go back to research done in the early 90's, and there has never been a serious patent claim against any of them.

This is at least partly by design: On2 had an explicit mission to create competitive codecs that avoided conflict with the MPEG patents. I'm pretty sure this was a major factor in their appeal to Google.

(Disclaimer: I was CTO &/or CEO of On2 up until 2003)