Well, one could argue that just sending bits cannot be in violation of any patents, though I'm not aware of any cases where this has been tested in court. If yo

Well, one could argue that just sending bits cannot be in violation of any patents, though I'm not aware of any cases where this has been tested in court. If you have any encoding / decoding anywhere in your company though, then you need a patent license and the licensor can pretty much ask for any terms, including those that include content fees. Note that content / distribution fees have been pretty much a norm in the video and audio codec space. MPEG-2 had per-DVD costs, for example. H.264 was the odd one out with MPEG-LA's "free internet video" exception. While it's officially denied, many suspect that exception was added due to competition with WebM VP8, which was released about the same time.