14 DAY TRIAL // Only a few weeks ago, Google was happily announcing that it had arrived at a settlement with MPEG LA, a video codec licensing group, over the VP8 codec and any of its successors.
MPEG LA is made up of all companies and groups with interest in video technologies and patents. The group had threatened to go after the VP8 codec, which Google planned to offer under an open license.
The agreement meant that Google was free to release VP8 as open source and everyone was free to use it without the fear of patent trolls, giant corporations scared of competition, or companies on their last limb desperately trying to survive, trying to squeeze some money out of them.
The move meant there was finally a top-notch video codec available to all free of any legal complications. This is why Google then moved to propose the video codec as international standard with the IEFT.
It didn't last long, Nokia remembered that it has a ton of patents, what with the phone business not going so well for the Finish company, and that some of them will surely apply to the VP8 video codec in one form or another.
Nokia has made its concerns known to the IEFT and has found dozens of patents and applications which it says are relevant to VP8.
The company says it has no plans to offer those patents for free or even under FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms to companies wanting to use VP8.
Nokia hasn't actually sued anyone, especially Google, over this, but this does mean the IEFT will have a hard time accepting the VP8 proposal and adopting it as standard.
The VP8 video codec was initially developed by On2 Technologies, which was acquired by Google back in 2010. Google acquired the company precisely for VP8 and quickly released the codec under a permissive, open source license.
The video codec, the algorithms behind it, were developed entirely by On2, who has been making video codecs for more than a decade.
But it's hard to solve a math problem, which is what algorithms are, and not come to the same conclusion as other people. Patents weren't supposed to apply to math, but nobody really cares about what patents were created for in the first place.
What they do care about is what they are being used for today, as weapons to bully smaller competitors, extort money from other players and generally be anti-competition. Of course, any government-granted monopoly is going to do that.