AV1 was supposed to be the video codec that freed the internet from patent trolls. Now Dolby is suing Snapchat over it, and if they succeed, the entire promise of "open, royalty-free video" could unravel.
AV1 emerged from the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium that includes Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and most major tech companies. They created it specifically to avoid the patent minefield that made previous codecs like H.265 such a legal nightmare. Every member contributed patents to a shared pool under terms that were supposed to prevent exactly this kind of lawsuit.
Dolby's position, as argued in their complaint against Snapchat, is that "Big Tech declaring AV1 royalty-free doesn't mean that it is." They claim to hold patents essential to AV1's operation that weren't included in the Alliance's patent pool. Therefore, anyone using AV1 needs to license those patents from Dolby.
If Dolby is right, this has massive implications. AV1 has been deployed across YouTube, Netflix, and countless other platforms specifically because companies believed they could use it without patent licensing fees. Browsers have built-in AV1 support. Hardware manufacturers have added AV1 decoding to their chips. If all of that suddenly requires Dolby licensing, the costs could be astronomical.
The technology itself is genuinely better than what came before. AV1 delivers better compression than H.264 and comparable quality to H.265 at lower bitrates. That means faster streaming, lower bandwidth costs, and better video quality. Those improvements matter for platforms trying to deliver 4K and eventually 8K video at scale.
But codec development exists in a legal minefield. Video compression involves thousands of patented techniques, and determining which patents actually cover which parts of a codec is complex enough to require small armies of lawyers. The Alliance for Open Media did extensive patent clearance work, but apparently not extensive enough for Dolby's satisfaction.
Why Snapchat specifically? Probably because Dolby is testing the waters with a defendant large enough to matter but not large enough to be part of the Alliance for Open Media consortium. If they can win against Snapchat, they can then pursue other platforms.
The Alliance will likely intervene in this case. Their entire value proposition depends on AV1 actually being royalty-free. If Dolby succeeds, it calls into question whether any codec can truly be when patent law is this complex.
