If you read that article carefully ("What’s the Problem with Theora?"), you'll notice that while significant research has been made, no one can actually be sure there are no submarine patents. The author doesn't say he "think there isn't any patent problem with Theora", he very carefully says that he hasn't found any.<p>And that is precisely my point — since you can never be entirely sure, using Theora (or VP6, or any other video codec for that matter) won't solve much in the long term.<p>BTW, as a related note it should be mentioned that at least Theora developers chose the right license for this kind of code — BSD. This avoids the huge landmine that x264 has set up for itself: the anti-patent clause in the LGPL/GPL (section 7 of the GPL).