Crack down on Google: Microsoft

[undesign]

Deliberate?

“After years of legal maneuvering, Google has now agreed to license the H.264 patents that WebM infringes,” Dilger reports. “‘This is a significant milestone in Google’s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format,’ said Allen Lo, Google’s deputy general counsel for patents in a press release. ‘We appreciate MPEG LA’s cooperation in making this happen.’”

Stupid?

Dilger reports, “However, WebM faces serious other problems apart from its patent infringement. The legal quandary Google erected by failing to properly license MPEG’s technology from the start means that it hasn’t seen any significant traction from third parties, preventing any of these issues (including a lack of hardware decoder support) from actually being addressed over the past three years. “

Who knows, just throwing it out there that Google is unlikely to be the the saint so many people like to believe.