<story><title>Google licenses VP8 patents from MPEG-LA</title><url>http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130307006192/en/Google-MPEG-LA-Announce-Agreement-Covering-VP8</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>danbmil99</author><text>Precisely the opposite. If MPEG-LA thought they had VP8 dead to rights, they would never have agreed to this deal -- they would have litigated to the bitter end.&lt;p&gt;This is actually a huge badge of honor for VP8, and a repudiation of the meme that somehow it&apos;s just an H.264 knock-off.  It&apos;s always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264 (aka MPEG4++).  MPEG-LA are IMSHO the very definition of trolls -- patenting (and charging royalties for) techniques that were obvious and known art in the video compression community for ages.</text></item><item><author>wmf</author><text>This shows that VP8 wasn&apos;t as patent-free as On2/Google claimed. OTOH, there&apos;s probably nothing to worry about now since Google has licensed the patents on behalf of everyone.&lt;p&gt;Original context from 2010: &lt;a href=&quot;http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nl</author><text>There is no such thing as &quot;dead to rights&quot; in a patent war over algorithms. It would come down to the jury, and it would be a gamble (as the disagreement amongst people &lt;i&gt;who should know&lt;/i&gt; about whether VP8 infringes or not shows).&lt;p&gt;The risk for MPEG-LA in &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; agreeing is that the patent pool would collapse - if Google isn&apos;t in then why should anyone else remain in the pool?&lt;p&gt;I do agree that this agreement seems to be pretty good for Google though. Their ability to sub license VP8 has the potential to undermine royalties for H264 to the patent pool.&lt;p&gt;BTW, MPEG-LA isn&apos;t a patent troll by any conventional definition.&lt;p&gt;Firstly, MPEG-LA &lt;i&gt;doesn&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; patent anything itself, they are merely an organisation to pool related patents amongst member organisations.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the member organisations are mostly (all?) the opposite of patent trolls, too: they hold patents in the field because they are &lt;i&gt;actively producing software in the field&lt;/i&gt;. That is the opposite of the typical non-practising-entity patent troll model.&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, if you do accept software patents then the patent pool model is actually quite a nice way to manage them. It means people who want to work in the field only have to deal with one entity and gain protection from patent claims from any other company in the field. (Note: I &lt;i&gt;don&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; accept software patents at all - just pointing out that while they exist this isn&apos;t a bad way to do them).&lt;p&gt;I have no real opinion on VP8 vs H264, but I do know that the patent situation is much more complex than you seem to believe.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google licenses VP8 patents from MPEG-LA</title><url>http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130307006192/en/Google-MPEG-LA-Announce-Agreement-Covering-VP8</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>danbmil99</author><text>Precisely the opposite. If MPEG-LA thought they had VP8 dead to rights, they would never have agreed to this deal -- they would have litigated to the bitter end.&lt;p&gt;This is actually a huge badge of honor for VP8, and a repudiation of the meme that somehow it&apos;s just an H.264 knock-off.  It&apos;s always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264 (aka MPEG4++).  MPEG-LA are IMSHO the very definition of trolls -- patenting (and charging royalties for) techniques that were obvious and known art in the video compression community for ages.</text></item><item><author>wmf</author><text>This shows that VP8 wasn&apos;t as patent-free as On2/Google claimed. OTOH, there&apos;s probably nothing to worry about now since Google has licensed the patents on behalf of everyone.&lt;p&gt;Original context from 2010: &lt;a href=&quot;http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anon1385</author><text>&amp;#62;It&apos;s always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264&lt;p&gt;The same community that hates patent trolls continued to use gif and MP3 for many years, so I&apos;m not sure why use of H264 would surprise you. And are people really &apos;in love&apos; with it? All I see is people who prefer the clearly technically superior option. Not to mention the fact that many of us live in places where software patents are not relevant, and don&apos;t feel inclined to use inferior technology just because of the idiocies of the US legal system.</text></comment>