They've been saying the same about Vorbis for the last 10 years and yet never sued anyone. No one uses Vorbis across applications (ie as an interchange format)

They've been saying the same about Vorbis for the last 10 years and yet never sued anyone. No one uses Vorbis across applications (ie as an interchange format) so it doesn't matter. Its peanuts. By the way, Vorbis is being used a lot by the billion dollar video games industry. Yes, but not as an interchange format, which is key. They know that if they ever sued us for using Vorbis we'd go back to any number of proprietary formats that we used before we started using Vorbis. We can do that on-the-fly because we don't use it as an interchange format - there's no legacy, no compatibility issues, nothing. We can just change and then there's no long-term licensing scenario for them. It isn't worth suing. Add to that the razor-thin margins across the games biz and the fact that most studios would just go bankrupt and close up shop if they were sued for this rather than pay-out and...why would they sue us again? Actually no, MPEG-LA and its users have been sued many times by patent trolls, read up the wikipedia article. H.264 is no safer, the MPEG-LA is just good at spreading FUD. Yes, probably. I'd like to say that the MPEG-LA with their h.264, having been around longer, is at least a safer, friendlier bunch of crooks. Sadly, not even licensing h.264 from the MPEG-LA will guarantee you'll stay out of court.