They've done the same thing with AV1, and I can't see that having prevented adoption, nor can I imagine Sisvel wanting to poke the bear that is AOMedia unless they're certain their case is absolutely watertight.
I see zero public evidence that they've filed any lawsuits against the members of AOM in any jurisdiction. I'm sure there's been a lot of threatening letters sent...
Yup. The Dolby/Disney vs Snapchat lawsuit is going to be the first one. So far it's only been filed.
The big question is if AOMedia is going to make good on their Mutually Assured Destruction promise of using their patent and financial war chest to to countersue into oblivion anyone trying to go after AV1 adaptors.
There situation is more intricate: the allegations are that Snapchat infringes patents through its use of the AV1 and HEVC codecs. Dolby states that it did not participate in AV1’s development and made no FRAND commitment with respect to AV1, and that its HEVC FRAND obligations apply only to decoding, not encoding.
Same, which is what makes it seem to me that that case is absolutely not watertight. Those patents are probably all about esoteric minutiae (to be fair, that's because that's what it takes to make a better video codec these days) and everything and anything that can seemingly be connected to AV2 (or AV1 for that matter), many of which have only gotten a patent because the person approving it only barely understands what it's saying.
Sisvel is a patent troll. Take a look at the combined list of all companies that are the AOM and tell me with a straight face that all of their corporate in house counsel specializing in intellectual property law are wrong.
I don't know this stuff super well but I imagine it's not necessarily about the lawyers being right or wrong so much as what they can convince people of. The ideal scenario for the patent troll is they can intimidate you into licensing with them. Another good outcome for them (though more costly) is they can convince some non-expert in court. In either case the big players behind the codec can defend themselves but a small one just picking it up downstream as OSS can't.
We need a more efficient way to eliminate bullshit patents or bullshit patent infringement claims than "violate them then spend millions on lawyers to fight them in court".
Stop big companies from ever forming. They are not a natural force that cannot be reckoned with. We allow them to exist. Revoke the charters of any business over 500 employees.
The disgusting part is that they are proud of how complicated and exploitable this patent situation is, acting as if they were the key experts in developing codecs when they are just experts in gating access to them. Like, their entire business model is based on negating the value of the inventions.
Trolls will always be trolls. The need to fight them just shows the need to reform the garbage patent system to make sure no one can ever patent software.