[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"$fgYPXTixlwCvuzVHOEM0IrxOQDYsYM9WVthVg51Oc7HQ":3},{"article":4,"related":18},{"id":5,"slug":6,"title":7,"seo_title":8,"description":9,"keywords":10,"content":11,"category":12,"image_url":13,"source_guid":14,"published_at":15,"created_at":16,"updated_at":17},597,"av1s-royalty-free-status-under-fire-as-dolby-sues-snapchat","AV1 Patent Siege: Why Royalty-Free Codecs Were Never Free","Dolby Sues Snapchat Over AV1 Patent Rights","Dolby's lawsuit against Snapchat challenges AV1's royalty-free status. What the patent dispute means for video codec licensing and the tech industry.","[\"AV1 patent lawsuit\",\"Dolby Snapchat lawsuit\",\"royalty-free codec\",\"Alliance for Open Media\",\"Access Advance\",\"video compression patents\",\"HEVC licensing\",\"codec patent pool\"]","\u003Cp>Dolby Laboratories filed suit against Snap Inc. on March 23, 2026, alleging that Snapchat's use of the AV1 video codec infringes four of its compression patents. The lawsuit, filed in both Delaware federal court and Rio de Janeiro state court, is the first time an Access Advance licensor has directly targeted a streaming platform over AV1. But the real story is not about Snapchat. It is about the decade-long fantasy that a consortium of trillion-dollar companies could engineer its way around the patent system, and the reckoning that was always coming.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>AV1 was built on a promise: that the video industry could have a modern, high-efficiency codec without the licensing chaos that plagued HEVC. That promise is now unraveling, not because AV1 failed technically, but because the legal architecture beneath it was never as solid as its backers claimed. The Dolby suit is not an isolated event. It is the latest shot in a coordinated campaign by patent holders who have spent years building the legal and commercial infrastructure to monetize AV1, and who are now pulling the trigger.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The HEVC Trauma That Built AV1\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>To understand why AV1 exists, you have to understand the disaster that preceded it. When HEVC (H.265) was finalized in 2013, it was supposed to be the universal successor to H.264. Instead, it became a cautionary tale in standards-body dysfunction. Three separate patent pools, MPEG LA, HEVC Advance (now Access Advance), and Velos Media, emerged with overlapping and sometimes contradictory licensing terms. At one point, more than 10,000 patents from dozens of companies were claimed as essential to the standard, and no single license could cover them all.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The result was paralysis. Netflix, YouTube, and most major browsers refused to adopt HEVC for streaming. Apple adopted it for hardware decoding but avoided it on the web. The codec that was technically superior to H.264 by roughly 40% in compression efficiency was effectively sidelined for consumer internet video because nobody could figure out what it would cost to use.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>This is the environment that gave birth to the Alliance for Open Media in 2015. Founded by Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, AOMedia set out to build a codec that would be both technically competitive and legally clean. The mechanism was straightforward: every AOMedia member would cross-license its relevant patents on a royalty-free basis, creating a commons that anyone could use without negotiating individual deals. AV1, released as a specification in 2018, was the product of that effort.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The pitch worked. By 2020, YouTube was encoding its entire library in AV1. Netflix followed. Hardware decoder support shipped in chips from MediaTek, Samsung, and Intel. Browser support became universal. AV1 became the de facto codec for internet video, adopted precisely because it appeared to eliminate the licensing uncertainty that had killed HEVC's momentum.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The Structural Flaw in \"Royalty-Free\"\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>Here is what AOMedia's founding members either failed to anticipate or chose to ignore: you cannot declare a technology royalty-free if other people hold patents that read on it. The royalty-free pledge only binds AOMedia members with respect to their own patents. It says nothing about the thousands of video compression patents held by companies that were never part of the alliance.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Video compression is not like, say, a new file format where you can design around prior art with clean-room engineering. Decades of research in block-based motion estimation, transform coding, entropy coding, and intra-prediction have produced a dense thicket of overlapping patents. Many of the fundamental techniques, dividing frames into blocks, predicting pixel values from neighboring regions, using arithmetic coding to compress the result, have been patented and re-patented in dozens of variations since the 1990s.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>When AOMedia designed AV1, it drew heavily on Google's VP9 codec but also incorporated techniques from Cisco's Thor and Mozilla's Daala projects. The goal was to match or exceed HEVC's compression efficiency. The problem is that matching HEVC's efficiency often means using similar mathematical approaches, and similar mathematical approaches tend to fall within the scope of patents originally filed around HEVC and its predecessors.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Dolby's four patents in the Snapchat suit illustrate this perfectly. U.S. Patent No. 10,855,990 covers color plane prediction methods. No. 9,924,193 addresses block merging and skip modes. No. 9,596,469 covers low-latency sample sequence coding. No. 10,404,272 deals with entropy coding techniques. These are not exotic edge cases. They describe core mechanisms in any modern block-based codec. Dolby's argument is simple: these techniques ended up in AV1's specification regardless of whether Dolby participated in AOMedia, and Dolby never agreed to license them for free.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The Patent Holders Organize\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>What makes the current moment different from the early grumbling about AV1 patents is the level of coordination among patent holders. Two parallel efforts have been building for years, and both are now operational.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The first is Sisvel, the Luxembourg-based patent licensing firm that announced an AV1 patent pool in 2019 and began offering licenses in 2020. Sisvel's pool now includes patents from Dolby, Philips, GE, NTT, Ericsson, and Toshiba, among others. The published list exceeds 1,500 patents. For years, the pool was mostly theoretical. Sisvel offered licenses, and most companies ignored them, betting that the patents were weak or that AOMedia's legal shield would hold. That bet is looking worse by the month.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The second is Access Advance, which in January 2025 launched its Video Distribution Patent Pool, a single license covering patents essential to HEVC, VVC, VP9, and AV1. The VDP pool's structure is clever: it offers video distributors a single royalty rate regardless of which codecs they use, removing the incentive to pick one codec over another to avoid licensing fees. For patent holders, it creates a unified enforcement vehicle. A company that refuses to license the VDP pool is exposed on every codec it uses, not just one.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Dolby is a licensor in both pools. The Snapchat lawsuit is the enforcement prong of a strategy that the licensing prong has been building toward for years. Access Advance even issued a press release framing the suit: its headline noted that a \"VDP licensor\" had sued Snap, essentially advertising that the lawsuit could have been avoided if Snap had taken a VDP license.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>InterDigital is running the same playbook independently. In November 2025, it sued Amazon across four jurisdictions, alleging that Fire TV devices infringe AV1 and VP9 patents. In February 2026, it expanded the campaign to include Prime Video, CloudFront, and additional content delivery patents. A RAND rate trial in the UK is scheduled for September 2026. If InterDigital wins a favorable rate determination, it will become the benchmark for what AV1 licensing costs globally.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>Who Is Actually Exposed\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>The Dolby-Snap lawsuit targets a relatively small player in video streaming. Snapchat processes enormous volumes of video, but it is not Netflix or YouTube. That is likely intentional. Patent litigators routinely pick initial targets that are large enough to matter but not so large that they will spend unlimited resources on defense. A win or settlement against Snap establishes a precedent and a royalty rate that can be leveraged against bigger targets.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The companies with the most to lose are, ironically, the ones that built AV1. Google processes more AV1 video than any entity on earth through YouTube. Meta uses AV1 across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Amazon streams AV1 through Prime Video and Twitch. Netflix encodes its entire catalog in AV1. All of these companies are AOMedia members whose own patents are cross-licensed royalty-free, but that cross-license does not protect them from Dolby, InterDigital, Sisvel, or any other non-member patent holder.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The uncomfortable truth is that AOMedia's founding members always understood this risk. Their implicit strategy was strength in numbers and deep pockets: if patent holders came knocking, the alliance's members would either invalidate the patents through inter partes review, negotiate collectively, or simply outlast the challengers in court. That strategy works when the patent holders are small non-practicing entities. It works less well when the challengers are Dolby and InterDigital, companies with substantial patent portfolios, proven track records in litigation, and the resources to fight across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>The FRAND Problem AV1 Cannot Escape\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>A critical detail in the Dolby lawsuit deserves more attention than it has received. The patents Dolby asserts against AV1 are not subject to any FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) licensing commitment. FRAND obligations typically attach when a patent holder participates in a standards body and declares its patents essential to the resulting standard. Dolby did not participate in AOMedia. It made no FRAND declaration for AV1. It is under no obligation to license its AV1-essential patents on reasonable terms, or at all.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>This is a structural advantage for Dolby that the HEVC patent holders largely did not have. Most HEVC essential patent holders participated in ITU or ISO standards processes and made FRAND commitments, which, while often disputed, at least provided a legal framework for determining reasonable royalty rates. With AV1, Dolby can argue for whatever rate it wants, and the only check is the court's willingness to impose it.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Compare this to the HEVC licensing landscape, where three pools competed for licensees but all operated within FRAND constraints. The irony is sharp: AV1 was designed to escape HEVC's licensing complexity, but it may end up facing worse terms precisely because its patent holders have fewer obligations to be reasonable.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Ch2>What Comes Next\u003C\u002Fh2>\u003Cp>Three predictions, stated with conviction.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>First, the patent campaign against AV1 will accelerate rapidly.\u003C\u002Fstrong> Dolby and InterDigital have filed the opening suits, but they are not alone. Sisvel's pool has 1,500-plus patents and dozens of licensors. Once the first settlement or verdict establishes a per-unit or per-subscriber royalty rate, other patent holders will file quickly to claim their share. By the end of 2027, every major video platform will either be paying AV1 royalties or actively litigating to avoid them.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Second, the concept of a \"royalty-free codec\" will be effectively dead for any codec that achieves meaningful compression efficiency.\u003C\u002Fstrong> The fundamental techniques of video compression are too heavily patented for any new codec to navigate the thicket cleanly. AOMedia's AV2, currently in development, will face the same challenges. The only codecs that can truly be royalty-free are those that are so technically primitive that they do not trigger any relevant patents, which means they are useless for modern video distribution.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Third, the industry will converge on Access Advance's VDP pool as the pragmatic solution.\u003C\u002Fstrong> The VDP pool's genius is that it makes the codec choice irrelevant to the licensing cost. Whether you use HEVC, VVC, AV1, or VP9, you pay one rate. This eliminates the primary motivation for choosing AV1 over VVC or HEVC: if you are paying royalties regardless, you might as well pick the codec with the best technical performance for your use case. VVC, which offers roughly 30% better compression than AV1 at comparable quality, suddenly becomes attractive again.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>For engineers and product teams making codec decisions today, the calculus has changed. AV1 remains an excellent codec with broad hardware support and strong open-source tooling. But the assumption that it is free to use, the assumption that drove its adoption, is no longer safe. Budget for licensing costs. Evaluate VVC seriously. And watch the InterDigital RAND trial in September 2026 closely, because whatever rate that court sets will become the floor for what AV1 costs everyone.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>The video codec wars were never really about technology. They were about who captures the economic value of compression. 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