I think kurdt, nop and perhaps others already brought this up but here's an interesting article on the subject:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20006245-264.htmlA sample...
Patent pool repercussions
For those accustomed to paying royalties for video codecs used in multimedia chips, Blu-ray players, and encoding software, a VP8 patent pool would be nothing out of the ordinary. But Google didn't set out to reinforce the status quo with VP8 and WebM.
Google got rights to VP8 when it acquired On2 Technologies for $124.6 million in February. The other component to WebM, a royalty-free audio codec called Vorbis, came from the Xiph Foundation.
Many companies want to make money off the underlying technology of digital video, but Google wants to make money off a vibrant Internet, and it wants to see today's barriers removed.
