Dolby Lawsuit Against Snapchat Challenges AV1 Codec's Royalty-Free Foundation

A new lawsuit is testing the legal foundations of a video technology designed to be free for everyone to use. Dolby Laboratories has filed a patent infringement suit against Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, in U.S. District Court in Delaware. The case centers on the AV1 video codec, which Snapchat uses to compress and stream video.

The AV1 standard was created by the Alliance for Open Media—a consortium including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Netflix—specifically as an open and royalty-free alternative to older, licensed codecs like HEVC. The alliance's policy states that its patents are available under a royalty-free license, aiming to avoid the complex licensing battles that have plagued the HEVC format.

Dolby's complaint, however, argues that AV1 incorporates video compression technologies that are covered by Dolby's existing patents, which were filed before AV1's development. The company asserts it never agreed to license these specific patents for free. The lawsuit names four patents related to video prediction and encoding methods that Dolby claims are "critical" to Snapchat's operations.

Dolby is asking the court for a jury trial, a declaration that it is not required to license the patents under so-called FRAND terms, and an order to stop Snap from using the technology. While legal disputes over HEVC are common, this case is notable for directly challenging the royalty-free premise of the newer AV1 standard. The outcome could influence how broadly the codec is adopted across the tech industry.

Source: Ars Technica