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I doubt it will work with Google. If you want to look for prior art on some patent, where are you going to look? Yahoo? Bing? Google has so well served searching for information that their company name is now the verb for that activity. Anybody who thinks theres a current patent that can't be defeated by prior art is kidding himself. If you're Google, there's always prior art. Even Marconi's radio patents were invalidated eventually in favor of Tesla - who was dead by then.

Google paid $133,000,000 for On2 and they didn't just buy their VP8 Codec, they bought the entire company including customers, patents and cross-patent licensing agreements that date back as far as the early 1990's, engineers, executives and lawyers. Google got an awesomely good deal here - the price of On2 was severely depressed below its true value by the market conditions, which is why wise companies save up their cash in good times by the way. If there were a better company to buy for video encoding, who would know that better than Google? Google is Google. They know stuff. On2 by itself has a long history of mergers and acquisitions - it was once valued at $1B. On2's VP6 was selected as the Macromedia Flash 8 video codec. VP3 was the basis of Theora. In 2005 Skype licensed the On2 codecs, all current and future versions. It was licensed by AOL. Even Microsoft has licensed On2 technologies since 1997. Oh, and China. China's big, right? China's DVD format is based on On2 codecs.

If the H.264 patent licensing consortium MPEG LA (Founded, 1996) wants a fight, I think Google's got a fight for them and Google's loaded for bear.

So we've got On2 codecs and technologies used in Flash, YouTube, China, Microsoft's video, and vastly many others over a nearly 20 year span. It's endorsed and supported by ARM, AMD(ATI) and Nvidia. Um, this one is completely over. The guy that thinks the On2 codecs are derivative of H.264 may be reversing his entropy arrow, but really it doesn't matter any more than the squeaking of a mouse blocking a tank tread.

We've also got a proponent with deep pockets. Google turns a profit of $2B a quarter. That's $22M a day, 7 days a week. They can afford some good lawyers, and lots of 'em. Maybe all of 'em. And that's not considering they have enough cash on hand to buy Kansas. They can afford to keep up the good fight forever without so much as an entry on their SEC forms. They can be stubborn, too... who walks away from the China market? Stubborn and well funded does not a good troll target make.

Somebody might try to get an edge here, but to steal a Star Wars quote: "These Federation types are cowards. The negotiations will be short."

Or not... this is the sort of epic "Clash of the titans" legal brawl I'd like to see play out on groklaw, now that the SCO thing is pretty much over.

Opensource/freeware doesnt means patent free.

AFAIK, there arn't any open-source patent-free standards for video codecs, fortunately we have better luck with image (PNG) and audio (FLAC) formats.

Besides MPEG-4, JPEG2000 is the only other "standard" option available for cutting edge video compression. JPEG2000 recently gained traction with digital cinema. But it will no longer be a surprise to see such patents come up for it within another 3-4 years. It has already had a near miss recently.

Disclaimer: Shameless self promotion, above text taken from this post at Data Compression News Blog: After JPEG, Now Patent Threat to MPEG-4

Opensource/freeware doesnt means patent free.

AFAIK, there arn't any open-source patent-free standards for video codecs, fortunately we have better luck with image (PNG) and audio (FLAC) formats.

Besides MPEG-4, JPEG2000 is the only other "standard" option available for cutting edge video compression. JPEG2000 recently gained traction with digital cinema. But it will no longer be a surprise to see such patents come up for it within another 3-4 years. It has already had a near miss recently.

Disclaimer: Shameless self promotion, above text taken from this post at Data Compression News Blog: After JPEG, Now Patent Threat to MPEG-4

Opensource/freeware doesnt means patent free.

AFAIK, there arn't any open-source patent-free standards for video codecs, fortunately we have better luck with image (PNG) and audio (FLAC) formats.

Besides MPEG-4, JPEG2000 is the only other "standard" option available for cutting edge video compression. JPEG2000 recently gained traction with digital cinema. But it will no longer be a surprise to see such patents come up for it within another 3-4 years. It has already had a near miss recently.

Disclaimer: Shameless self promotion, above text taken from this post at Data Compression News Blog: After JPEG, Now Patent Threat to MPEG-4

Its been around since more than 7 months now
Here is a link to their New Year post

6 Months of Compression News
http://www.c10n.info/archives/302

They have already been challaged by many, but for the first time someone has a concrete case with 'prior art'. You can read more on this at The Data Compression News Blog

White Knight Charges Forgent http://www.c10n.info/archives/246

[Disclaimer: Shameless self promotion]

I dont think any DRM solution can make much of a difference. There are softwares available which, don't do the decryption themselves, and instead patch OS or iTunes/Winamp/WinMediaPlayer/etc... to output the decrypted stream to disk instead of the sound card. There are also softwares available which just redirect anything sent to soundcard to disk. These can be used to record internet radio as non-DRM-protected files. Checkout this another post at The Data Compression News Blog http://www.c10n.info/archives/55 Sachin Garg [India] http://www.sachingarg.com/