Let’s see, you’re using (and own some of the patents behind) a codec that’s extremely popular for web media, is well-supported on mobile devices, and provides high quality and small filesizes. It’s competitive on its own. However, it runs the risk of being expensive in the future, and there’s a competitor that doesn’t even come close to your codec on any of those, except for being an open standard. It runs the risk of defeating your codec of choice, because of that.
The logical response would be to steer the licensing body of your codec to make it very cheap, right?
No, the response that Apple appears to be choosing is to gather a bunch of patents together, and sue the makers and users of the free codec into oblivion.
I wish I were joking, but I’m not.
There have been fears of patent threats against Theora before, but this is an actual organized attack against it, simply for the sake of removing competition to H.264.
If that isn’t evil, I don’t know what is.
Source: The Register