MPEG LA lawyers began collecting patent pool against VP8 codec

The "open and free" VP8 video codec from the WebM suite may not be so free. You may still have to pay the same royalties for using it as for H.264. At least, the MPEG LA consortium, which controls the video standard AVC / H.264, believes so. They have already started the selection of patents that can be submitted against the VP8 codec.

According to the executive director of MPEG LA, this is a standard procedure in a competitive market. They create such pools for each video codec that can enter the market and potentially threaten the intellectual property of MPEG LA.

WebM has not yet entered the market and is in the dev preview stage. The package also includes the Vorbis audio codec and the Matroska container. MPEG LA has no complaints about these components.
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From a business point of view, it would be beneficial for MPEG LA consortium to wait for a certain time until the market masters the supposedly free codec from Google to the maximum, and only then put forward demands for paying license fees from each user. Even Google cannot guarantee that such a scenario will not materialize, although its lawyers conducted a thorough analysis and are “quite sure” of the patent purity of VP8, but this is still not a guarantee.