AV1’s open, royalty-free promise in question as Dolby sues Snapchat over codec

Big Tech declaring AV1 royalty-free “doesn't mean that it is."

See full article...

 

[marsilies]

I wonder how much of this “business model” consists of waiting for a technology to be so widespread that it’s infeasible to stop using it, then jumping up and yelling “I declare patent infringement!”

They don't fit exact, but the concepts of a patent ambush and submarine patent are similar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_ambush
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent

 

[marsilies]

There should be a statute of limitations on filing infringement claims. Seems to me AVI's been around like 30 years.

Patents are only good for 20 years. AV1 itself, specifically, was initially released on March 28, 2018, so only 8 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent#Effects

From the article, the alleged infringed patents are:

• U.S. Patent No. 10,855,99 “Inter-plane prediction” , filed 2016-06-28
• U.S. Patent No. 9,924,193 “Picture coding supporting block merging and skip mode” , filed 2013-05-02
• U.S. Patent No. 9,596,469 “Sample array coding for low-delay”, filed 2013-12-26
• U.S. Patent No. 10,404,272 “Entropy encoding and decoding scheme.”, filed 2018-11-21

So all still are within their 20 year lifespan, and the first 3 were filed before AV1 was released. The last patent was released after AV1's initial release, but before its latest release, of January 8, 2019 , so it's possible it's something added to AV1 later, or the AV1 initial release may count as "prior art" and invalidate the patent.

If you think an open codec has existed longer, prior to AV1, Google has VP9, which was initially released in June 17, 2013. VP9 has had market penetration, expecially within the WebM container:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM

AV1 is the successor to VP9, in that VP9 tech served as the basis for AV1, with other companies contributing additional techniques. So VP9 could also be prior art to counter some of these patent filings, although the second patent predates even VP9.