The Open Media Alliance (AOMedia), which oversees the development of the AV1 video encoding format, has released a statement regarding Sisvel's efforts to form a patent pool to collect royalties on AV1. The AOMedia Alliance is confident that it will be able to overcome the challenges and maintain the free, royalty-free nature of AV1. AOMedia will protect the AV1 related ecosystem through a specially designed patent protection program.
AV1 is initially developed as a royalty-free video encoding format based on the technology, patents and intellectual property of the members of the AOMedia alliance who have licensed their patents to AV1 users royalty-free. For example, AOMedia members include companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Facebook, Amazon, Intel, IBM, AMD, ARM, Samsung, Adobe, Broadcom, Realtek, Vimeo, Cisco, NVIDIA, Netflix, and Hulu. AOMedia's patent licensing model is similar to the W3C's approach to creating royalty-free Web technologies.
Before the publication of the AV1 specification, an assessment of the situation with patenting video codecs and legal examination was carried out, which involved lawyers and world-class codec specialists. For the unrestricted distribution of AV1, a special patent agreement has been developed, providing the opportunity to use this codec and related patents free of charge. The license agreement for AV1 provides for the revocation of rights to use AV1 in the event of patent claims against other users of AV1, i.e. companies cannot use AV1 if they are involved in legal proceedings against AV1 users.
Source: opennet.ru