OSNews

You have something of a point: any patent that covers Theora probably also covers any technology that encodes compressed video. If MPEG-LA holds such a patent, a patent that covers Theora, then they probably hold a patent that covers all functional video codecs (and, notably, would therefore cover any hypothetical competitor they would ever have). It would put them in a position to guarantee that their products where the only legal video codecs anywhere, period, ever (as any competing codec would infringe their patens). Such a patent would have to be something like a patent on "the presentation of moving pictures", or "compression algorithms optimized for sequences of images", or something else inescapably fundamental to the concept of a video codec. But, as Lemur has frequently said (much as it pains me to paraphrase him), if such a patent existed, for all the effort that Apple (and probably MPEG-LA) have put into finding it, it would've been brought to bear by now. It would be an incredibly powerful weapon, one they would not have waited until now to use -- and one that they would not be vague about. The moment they came into possession of such a patent, there would be a press release that read, "we now control the video distribution industry", and my God would that control be exploited.