[ethin]

And how long will it take before someone implements this standard and gets sued because Adobe or Dolby or whoever wanted to get slapped down? My knowledge may be out of date but if this is as "open" as AV1, I'm very skeptical that the individual companies will actually allow that. Greed and all that.

[zamadatix]

It took 7 years for the first patent assertion claim against AV1 to go to the courts and it will probably take a while for that case to resolve. Funnily enough, it wasn't from the pool constantly putting itself in the news about it over the years. I.e. it can take quite a while before attempts are made.

[throawayonthe]

i'll be surprised if anything comes of it because like... https://aomedia.org/about/members/ if the legal departments of all these corporations haven't made them drop av1 in all these years there's probably not much there?

[zamadatix]

I'd like to think so as well (well, I don't know they'd necessarilymake them "drop" it as much as license those particular patents/accept the risk they may have to pay in the future) but on the other hand history has shown VP8 had a lot of companies behind it too before Google signed to sublicense patents from the MPEG LA & other holders for it.

[ZeroGravitas]

VP8 was developed by a small company and bought and open sourced by Google on a fairly short timescale because the proprietary codec group had tried to start exerting their control.

So it's not accurate to say that had a lot of companies behind it. That usage came later and even then it was mostly in odd corners of the video industry.

[zamadatix]

Who originally developed the codec is only half the story. In 2011, 17 companies created a CCL agreement around VP8+WebM. In 2013 Google signed the sub-licensing agreement to keep it free. Any of the legal teams at those 17 companies had the chance to catch it before then. That there were a lot of legal team reviews by the big tech companies involved did not catch everything. The system isn't designed in a way to make that a solid guarantee like it should be.

[buran77]

> It took 7 years for the first patent assertion claim against AV1

This might just mean that if the claim is found valid, there's seven years' worth of inertia slowing down any effort to move on. Seven years in which HW and SW manufacturers worked to build in the support, and you the user developed your processes or workflows around assumptions specifically tied to that solution. I'd rather know on day one if I should go that way or not.

[dataflow]

On that topic: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...

[markvdb]

Patent trolls are nasty. How long will it take for one to get the full support of those shaking the independence of the US judiciary for their own gain? Let's hope the rot stops before that.

[shmerl]

No one can predict patent trolls - they can surface at any time randomly. But there should be a more organized fight against them. I assume AOM should be backing that.