[pgeorgi]

VLC even ships with everything to "crack" DVDs. Those tools are flying under the radar, but Firefox probably won't (with two direct competitors being part of MPEG-LA).

Firefox makes money (through the search engine integration at least), VLC et al do not.

It might also help that VLC is a french project. Laws and patents are sufficiently different that it takes effort to build a case, while for US cases the MPEG-LA + members have probably a template on file where they only have to fill in the victim.

[devcpp]

Fun fact: back in 2005, France had a law proposal to ban all free software and VLC was under threat. http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html