This is obviously 'plan b' in terms of preventing a royalty-free video codec from being standarised, as evidenced by Nokia not being interested in licencing the

This is obviously 'plan b' in terms of preventing a royalty-free video codec from being standarised, as evidenced by Nokia not being interested in licencing the possibly infringed upon patents at all. In short they want to kill off vp8, or at the very least prevent it from becoming a HTML5/RTC standard. One would ask oneself what Nokia stands to gain, as it logically would make more sense for them to ask for a licence fee than to try to prevent VP8 from being used. Of course, knowing that Microsoft holds the reigns at Nokia through Elop it's not that much of a mystery. Also highlighted by Nokia lying in their statement: "We are now witnessing one company attempting to force the adoption of its proprietary technology, which offers no advantages over existing, widely deployed standards such as H.264 and infringes Nokia's intellectual property." The hypocrisy and outright lying is frightening. VP8 is not proprietary in any meaning of the word, while it's being developed pretty much solely by Google it's done so in fully open source fashion, through a public git repo. It's advantages is that it's geared towards real-time video and of course entirely royalty free, the latter being what rubs MPEGLA the wrong way. A court (or likely several as the patents are applied in several countries) will have to decide upon the validity of these patents. But of course the whole point of this is again to throw a patent cloud over VP8 in order to prevent it from being standarised as part of HTML5/VP8, these proceedings will take time during which h264 will likely have time to entrench itself as the HTML5 video option despite not being an official mandatory implementation. The stakes are high as the members of MPEGLA are expecting to cash in on royalties by cornering the video codec market, and obviously a roaylty free quality codec is an enormous threat to their continous royalty-based cash flow. I guess it should have have caused alarm when MPEGLA backed off VP8 like they did, I can ony assume they knew of this impending patent suit from Nokia. I really hope Google stays the course and fights Nokia, but of course then some other sock puppet patent holder will likely emerge. In short, I don't see a chance in hell anymore that we will be able to benefit from a royalty free web standard and all the potential that this holds. If Google backs off trying to standarise VP8 I'm certain MPEGLA cohorts will stop harassing them, unfortulately this means we will have an effective monopoly in the video codec market and that's bad for everyone but the MPEGLA members. And what can I say about Nokia, a company I once held in great regard, now a Microsoft subsidiary in all but writing, led by a major Microsoft shareholder, how sad.