AV1’s idealism hits the courtroom
For years, AV1 has been sold as the clean break from the messy, royalty‑ridden world of video codecs – a modern, open standard blessed by Big Tech and supposedly safe from patent toll booths. Dolby’s new lawsuit against Snap threatens to shatter that narrative. If a court agrees that key AV1 techniques sit on patents that were never pledged royalty‑free, AV1 stops being a legal safe harbour and becomes just another licensing minefield. In this piece, we’ll look at what Dolby is really challenging, who stands to win or lose, and what this means for streaming platforms, hardware makers, and regulators – especially in Europe.
The news in brief
According to Ars Technica, Dolby Laboratories has filed a lawsuit against Snap in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging that Snapchat’s use of the AV1 video codec infringes four Dolby patents related to video compression techniques. Dolby argues that AV1 relies on technologies it patented earlier, overlapping with methods used in HEVC/H.265, and that these patents were never promised under a royalty‑free or FRAND (fair, reasonable and non‑discriminatory) framework.
Snap already licenses HEVC patents through a patent pool but, according to Dolby, has declined to licence Dolby’s alleged AV1‑relevant patents, despite repeated approaches via the Access Advance pool and directly. Dolby is asking for a jury trial, an injunction against further infringement, and a declaration that it does not have to offer FRAND‑style licences for the patents at issue.
As Ars Technica notes, this comes as InterDigital is also suing over AV1 support in some Amazon Fire devices, and as patent pools like Access Advance and Sisvel market AV1 licence packages despite the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) promoting AV1 as royalty‑free.
Why this matters
Dolby is not just suing Snap; it is challenging the political promise behind AV1. AOMedia – backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Meta and others – positioned AV1 as the way out of the HEVC mess: one codec, modern performance, and no cheques to write. Dolby’s filing is effectively saying: that promise was never yours to make.
The immediate losers are companies that believed that narrative at face value. Streaming platforms, browser vendors, TV manufacturers and even indie developers have been rolling out AV1 support assuming the legal risk was marginal. If courts confirm that substantial parts of AV1 sit on patents owned by non‑AOMedia companies with no royalty‑free pledge, the risk profile changes overnight.
Dolby and other patent holders stand to gain. After years of focusing mainly on hardware royalties, rights‑holders have discovered that the real bandwidth – and therefore real money – is in cloud streaming. As Ars Technica quotes IP commentator Florian Mueller, many services ran for years without licences because patent holders prioritised device vendors; that era is ending.
Snap is an interesting target. It’s big enough to be worth suing, but not so big that taking it to court automatically triggers a global standards war. It is also deeply reliant on short‑form, mobile‑first video where every byte of compression matters. That makes Dolby’s claim – that its patented techniques are central to Snapchat’s user experience – more credible in front of a jury.
The broader industry message is blunt: in video, there is no such thing as a free lunch. AOMedia’s branding of AV1 as royalty‑free was always aspirational. Dolby is now asking a judge to say it was also misleading.
The bigger picture: codec wars, round two
This lawsuit sits on top of 20 years of codec battles. MPEG‑2, H.264/AVC and later HEVC delivered huge technical gains, but at the cost of ever more fragmented patent ownership and unpredictable licensing. Hardware makers were hit first; then TV manufacturers, then smartphone OEMs. Services mostly slipped through the cracks – until streaming usage exploded.
AOMedia was the industry’s counter‑move: take the biggest buyers of video technology (Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc.), pool their patents, and design a codec that they promise to licence royalty‑free. WebM/VP9 was the prototype; AV1 was the industrial‑strength version.
But video compression is an incremental, cumulative field. Nearly every new codec reuses concepts from predecessors: block‑based prediction, motion vectors, entropy coding variants. Dolby’s complaint leans exactly on that continuity, arguing that AV1’s cleverness sits on foundations laid – and patented – during the HEVC era.
We have seen this movie before. Google’s VP8 once faced a patent pool organised by MPEG LA; that battle ended in settlements and quiet cross‑licensing, not in a decisive court ruling that blessed VP8 as truly royalty‑free. MP3’s patents expired only after years of licensing revenue, even though “MP3 is free now” stories had circulated long before.
What is different this time is who is exposed. AV1 has already made it into web browsers, smart TVs, game consoles and mobile SoCs. YouTube and Netflix use AV1 aggressively for bandwidth savings. If AV1 turns out to be legally encumbered, it is not a niche experiment at risk – it is mainstream internet infrastructure.
Dolby’s move also intersects with a growing push by patent pools to monetise software and services, not just chips and TVs. Access Advance and Sisvel both offer AV1 pool licences; InterDigital’s case against Amazon Fire devices points in the same direction. Dolby vs. Snap is the first high‑profile test of whether that strategy will work.
The European and regional angle
Europe is not in this courtroom, but it has a lot at stake. European regulators already took a close look at AOMedia: the European Commission opened an antitrust probe into its licensing policy in 2022, then quietly closed it in 2023 for “priority reasons”, explicitly without ruling on its legality. Dolby’s lawsuit now indirectly revives that question: was AOMedia’s royalty‑free messaging giving buyers a false sense of legal certainty?
European markets are especially sensitive to IP and platform power. The planned EU regulation on standard‑essential patents (SEPs) aims to make licensing more transparent and predictable, precisely to avoid surprises like this. If US courts confirm that AV1 implements essential patents outside any FRAND or royalty‑free commitment, Brussels may feel vindicated in pushing for tighter SEP governance.
On the commercial side, European streaming platforms – from DAZN and Sky to national broadcasters’ services like ARD Mediathek, BBC iPlayer (UK), or Salto’s successors in France – all face the same decision: embrace AV1 for efficiency, or stay with older codecs to avoid legal risk. Many already hesitated on AV1 because HEVC hardware support is ubiquitous while AV1 acceleration is patchier. Legal uncertainty could tilt them further toward conservative choices.
For European hardware vendors and operators, from TV makers to telcos, the picture is similar. A mid‑size European OEM or ISP is far less equipped than a US hyperscaler to fight a patent case in Delaware. The safe option may be: wait, keep shipping H.264/HEVC, and let US giants absorb the legal flak. That, ironically, could slow Europe’s own ambitions for greener, more efficient networks.
Looking ahead: what to watch
This case will move slowly; patent litigation usually does. But the industry won’t wait for a final verdict to react.
Expect three near‑term responses:
- Silent risk reassessment. Legal teams at every major platform using AV1 – YouTube, Netflix, Twitch, TikTok, device OEMs – will model worst‑case royalty exposure. Some planned AV1 roll‑outs may quietly slip or shrink.
- Negotiation and pool pressure. Patent pools will use the lawsuit as a sales pitch: pay now, avoid being the next Snap. Even without a judgement, the mere existence of the case strengthens their hand.
- Standardisation pivots. AOMedia may accelerate work on successors or profile tweaks that try to steer around the most contentious patents. History suggests this is hard: designing around a dense patent thicket without losing performance is rarely clean.
Longer term, the strategic question is whether the industry doubles down on AOMedia‑style “royalty‑free by design” or retreats to the more traditional FRAND model used by MPEG standards like VVC. European policymakers will have a say here: if the EU’s SEP regulation rewards transparent FRAND frameworks, that may make the AOMedia experiment look less attractive.
The open question is how far Dolby is willing to go. Is this primarily leverage for industry‑wide AV1 licensing deals, or is Dolby prepared to risk weakening AV1 so much that it slows down an entire generation of internet video? Patent holders usually prefer cash over destruction, but negotiations can misfire.
For developers and startups, the pragmatic move is to treat “royalty‑free” as a marketing label, not a legal guarantee. If your business model depends heavily on video, you should factor potential codec royalties into your long‑term risk planning, even for supposedly open standards.
The bottom line
Dolby’s lawsuit against Snap is less about one social app and more about the credibility of AV1’s royalty‑free story. If courts side with Dolby, AV1 becomes another negotiated compromise rather than the clean break it was sold as. Companies betting on “free” codecs will need a legal Plan B, and regulators – especially in Europe – will feel renewed pressure to untangle the patent thicket behind digital standards. The uncomfortable question for the industry is simple: after this, will anyone still believe in truly royalty‑free video at scale?
