Granted. I know very little about patents, I still see these loaded statements as conscience injections, red herrings, and convenient sound bites for zealots like Gruber. Might is different that is, but on Gruber's blog it's a testament to an agenda. The MPEG LA knows this.
There is no doubt in my mind that someone has a registered patent that the VP8 codec infringes on, due to the terrible state of the patent system as a whole. Now whether that is a valid patent is something that lawyers and lots of money will determine. However, someone needs to front that money, and AFAIK Google isn't providing patent indemnity for using the codec. It really is a smart business move to pay the relatively small license fee to MPEG LA than risk losing your entire company to a lawsuit (or lawyer fees)
If you really believe the patent system is that bad, then it's just as likely that a rogue patent reads on H.264. Although popularly believed, the MPEG-LA doesn't provide patent indemnity for H.264 so you can pay the small licence fee and still lose your entire company in a lawsuit.
Well the odds are somewhat high that if one has a patent on something in h.264, they would have joined the consortium and gotten royalties for it already. Plus there are a lot of patents that already exist in the patent pool that MPEG-LA has, which is indirectly what the MPEG-LA guy is saying, that one of them probably infringes.
My head hurt after going through one software patent trying to figure out what it actually meant. I can't imagine cross referencing every single patent against everything that WebM does.
