Error in Dolby v AV1

[indolering]

I think there is a pretty basic legal error in the recent AV1 article:

As Mueller pointed out, HEVC was created with most essential patent holders signing a FRAND licensing pledge, which differs from AV1’s creation:

With AV1, it could turn out that there are far more patent holders out there with essential patents but no FRAND licensing obligation. In that case, they could theoretically ask for anything, even extortionate amounts, up to the point where someone would then stop implementing AV1. And the really bad thing here, which I’m sure is not Dolby’s objective but it could be someone else’s, is that someone could purposely make prohibitive royalty demands for AV1 in order to discourage use of the standard.

Florian Mueller's legal commentary is materially misleading: MPEG and AOM are both just groups of patent holders who agreed to license those patents to users of their codec. Every coding technique went through legal review before being accepted into their respective standards. HEVC users are equally exposed to patent trolls refraining from the standards process and suing after-the-fact.

Agreeing to FRAND didn't prevent the HEVC patent holders from breaking into ~5 groups that charge wildly higher fees compared to H.264 (the max yearly cap is ~$100 million – about the same price Google paid for On2/VP8). It was so bad that MPEG excluded the more exuberant HEVC patent holders from participating in the VVC standard. Despite VVC going through the same legal review as HEVC to account for all "essential patent owners", the ostracized licensing groups still setup a licensing program for VVC ... just as they have done for AV1 and AV2.

Florian Mueller used to publish a blog called FOSSPatents, where he dolled out similarly flawed analysis and engaged in scaremongering aimed at the FOSS community. I believe his actions qualify him as an unreliable (if not an outright partisan) source.