> Unified Patents is a membership organization that has aggressively contested patent abuse and recently challenged the validity of 29% of the HEVC-related patents in the Velos Media HEVC pool. Commenting on the Sisvel announcement, Unified Patents CEO Kevin Jakel said, "We continue to be concerned with the lack of transparency in these licensing programs. Sisvel publishes its pricing for VP9 and AV1, but not how it came about with this price. They also have not provided a public list or even number of patents which they consider essential. It makes it very hard for anyone to ascertain how relevant the patents are and how to value them. This creates uncertainty for companies deploying technology which we think is negative for everyone."

To my eyes, there's a pretty decent chance that the Sisvel pool is an HEVC industry ploy to propagate FUD around AV1 and VP9 (suspiciously both, the latter seeming to have been the subject of no lawsuits, despite being deployed widely for about six years), to stop the bleeding w.r.t. HEVC licensing (which is still an absolute steaming dump in the lap of your legal department).

I'll believe it when I see the receipts, and even then, it'd probably be less of a minefield than HEVC. And to be fair Sisvel has not, in other industries, seemed to be a particularly insidious actor; but given the number of big fish who are obviously using VP9 encoders to do tens of billions of dollars of business without licensing anything from Sisvel, I can't see it as anything other than bluster.

HEVC Advance lists 681 US patents in their patent list.

It is completely unlikely that AV1 infringes on none of them or any other patents.

However, there's a big giant gap between a valid patent and actually expecting to get royalties without even revealing which patents are supposedly being infringed on even now that AV1 is standardised and in production usage.

So do I think that AV1 is patent-free when all is said and done from a legal standpoint? No. Do I think it'll be royalty-free anyway? Yes.

Also:

> 1.3. Defensive Termination. If any Licensee, its Affiliates, or its agents initiates patent litigation or files, maintains, or voluntarily participates in a lawsuit against another entity or any person asserting that any Implementation infringes Necessary Claims, any patent licenses granted under this License directly to the Licensee are immediately terminated as of the date of the initiation of action unless 1) that suit was in response to a corresponding suit regarding an Implementation first brought against an initiating entity, or 2) that suit was brought to enforce the terms of this License (including intervention in a third-party action by a Licensee).

vs.

* JVC Kenwood Corporation * Koninklijke Philips N.V. * Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation * Orange S.A. * Toshiba IPR Solutions, Inc.

If they are intending to initiate any patent litigation (which is going to be a very long time yet not least of all because they won't even reveal which patents) I think they're going to be at a losing end very very quickly having waited this long for VP9/AV1 to establish themselves.

It occurs to me that the easiest way to flush out the risk is for AV1 to launch a defamation case against any patent licensing pool which claims to hold a relevant patent. If it’s a lie, that is straight up defamation.

(Or a similar tort/breach. In Australia it would constitute a case of misleading or deceptive conduct under the ACL.)

This particular form of suit may be difficult in the U.S, owing to a somewhat different set of tradeoffs. It might be simple commercial fraud, if you could prove that they had misrepresented their certainty that their pool contained patents which they reasonably believed to be essential to implementing an AV1/VP9 encoder/decoder; though I think it may be very very hard to prove something like that.

It's not about winning the case, it's about forcing the other side to show their hand.

And if it's not a lie, and they're going to find some judge in East Texas who'll see infer some infringement among one some detail in one of the bazillion patents in the pool, you're screwed.

Patent cases of this sort seem to broadly favour the litigant so why stir the hornet's nest.

It wouldn’t be a patent case, it would be a tort. Either you win and the problem goes away, or you lose and you know which patent you need to rewrite around.

For the cost of some legal fees, a loss seems like a great value.