This part was interesting to me: VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile w

This part was interesting to me: VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder. Then later, about the encoder: there were comments describing bugfixes dating as far back as early 2004. That’s right: this software is even older than x264! Wouldn't that mean that VP8 didn't copy if the software is older? Prior art? I mean, you can't write an encoder for a spec that doesn't exist. IANAL, so I'd like some info here.