> Google's engineers are making the call and the counsel is just providing legal advice. The legal counsel doesn't know what is infringing on what.
[citation needed]
What makes you think that a big company with enormous potential for legal liability would let engineers make decisions that are of legal consequence, like whether to aggressively push a video format amidst a patent minefield?
Do you think the engineers wrote the patent license too?
With that said, you'd probably say that you trust Google's engineers more than me. I'd hope so. You have no idea who I am.