Google’s WebM may not be royalty-free for long

The MPEG LA CEO: "[...] there have been expressions of interest from the market urging us to facilitate formation of licenses that would address the market’s need for a convenient one-stop marketplace alternative to negotiating separate licenses with individual patent holders in accessing essential patent rights for VP8 [...]"

He's making it sound like people are desperate to pay a license fee to MPEG LA and wanting to be saved from Google's evil open source, royalty free clutches. However, it is his company that is creating this situation by threatening to patent troll VP8/WebM.

I read his statement as a thiny veiled threat: Dare to use WebM and we will unleash the dogs and make your life difficult. Classic FUD, Microsoft would be proud.

What a pain in the ass this is. I mean, I don't blame MPEG LA for trying to protect their business, but it's really lame that someone can create their own piece of software or codec, put a lot of hard work into it for others to enjoy and then another company or individual can come along and claim the rights to it and be legally backed when they try to get royalties for something they never worked on.

On an unrelated note, am I the only one bothered that a lot of online publications put the stock "name" after the company name?

  ... favored by Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT).

What good does this really do?

They've said the same thing about Vorbis and 10 years later there's still nothing. I'm with Google on that one. MPEGLA will just keep the FUD going for years like they did with Vorbis.

VP8 has already been in use for years by Skype and many others, there was already plenty of money to be done back then, so why didn't they sue back then?