> Unified Patents is a membership organization that has aggressively contested patent abuse and recently challenged the validity of 29% of the HEVC-related pate

> Unified Patents is a membership organization that has aggressively contested patent abuse and recently challenged the validity of 29% of the HEVC-related patents in the Velos Media HEVC pool. Commenting on the Sisvel announcement, Unified Patents CEO Kevin Jakel said, "We continue to be concerned with the lack of transparency in these licensing programs. Sisvel publishes its pricing for VP9 and AV1, but not how it came about with this price. They also have not provided a public list or even number of patents which they consider essential. It makes it very hard for anyone to ascertain how relevant the patents are and how to value them. This creates uncertainty for companies deploying technology which we think is negative for everyone." To my eyes, there's a pretty decent chance that the Sisvel pool is an HEVC industry ploy to propagate FUD around AV1 and VP9 (suspiciously both, the latter seeming to have been the subject of no lawsuits, despite being deployed widely for about six years), to stop the bleeding w.r.t. HEVC licensing (which is still an absolute steaming dump in the lap of your legal department). I'll believe it when I see the receipts, and even then, it'd probably be less of a minefield than HEVC. And to be fair Sisvel has not, in other industries, seemed to be a particularly insidious actor; but given the number of big fish who are obviously using VP9 encoders to do tens of billions of dollars of business without licensing anything from Sisvel, I can't see it as anything other than bluster.