&#62; <i>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.</i><p>That's just silly.<p>It's easier to defend against a submarine patent of which you knew nothing about, than to defend against MPEG-LA in case you just breached their license. Not to mention that nothing guarantees that you won't get sued with a submarine patent even when you have a legally licensed H.264<p>Plus ... we simply don't have too many patent threats that go to trial. The best case scenario would actually be for Theora to become a widely popular standard, and then for Mozilla to get sued for it ... the public needs such trials, and the supreme court of justice also needs such trials ... how else would could they realize that software patents are so dumb? The reality is that such threats are usually settled out of court.<p>Not to mention that when a company has the resources and the trial goes public gathering lots of supporters, the patent troll tends to get screwed (see SCO vs Novell).