Alliance for Open Media (AOM) is an organization founded by a number of large companies in the technology industry with the goal of challenging the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) with new, open and royalty-free standards for media compression.
The group’s first project is the video codec of1, which has gradually begun to be used in some video players and browsers, and on services such as Netflix and Youtube. According to tests, the format has comparable or slightly better quality at the same bit rate as hevc.
The organization develops av1 and other software as open source and all contributions are checked to ensure that they do not infringe on any patents. When a certain technology lacks patent-free alternatives, the patent owner is asked to join the organization and give it the right to use the patented technology without restrictions according to AOM’s license agreement.
Now reports Reuters that the European Commission has started an investigation to see if AOM has violated competition rules. The Commission has previously sent a survey to selected companies with questions about both patents from companies that were not members of AOM from the beginning, and about a clause in the license agreement for av1 which means that a licensee loses the right to all pending patents from other patent holders if it sues AOM or another member for patent infringement in the standard.
A spokesman for the European Commission told Reuters that an investigation should not be interpreted as stating that some crimes had already been committed.
The investigation may seem strange from a consumer perspective, given that the AOM and av1 standard can make our gadgets cheaper, and also a competitive perspective as it frees small companies to use modern video technologies without having to pay royalties or be worried about patent disputes.
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