Dolby Laboratories has filed a lawsuit against Snap Inc., alleging that Snapchat infringes on four of its patents through its use of the AV1 video codec. The suit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, challenges AV1's status as a royalty-free technology. Dolby seeks an injunction and a jury trial to enforce licensing obligations.
Dolby Laboratories Inc., based in San Francisco, accuses Snap Inc. of using patented technologies in Snapchat's implementation of the AV1 video codec without paying royalties. The complaint targets four US patents: No. 10,855,999 for inter-plane prediction; No. 9,924,193 for picture coding supporting block merging and skip mode; No. 9,596,469 for sample array coding for low-delay; and No. 10,404,272 for entropy encoding and decoding scheme. According to the filing, Snapchat accepts AV1-compliant videos, decodes and encodes them for delivery across devices, and tracks AV1 support on user devices to stream accordingly. These features allegedly reuse concepts from HEVC, which requires licensing fees, giving Snapchat an unfair advantage, Dolby claims. The lawsuit states that AOMedia, which developed AV1 with members including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix under a royalty-free patent policy, does not own all relevant patents. 'AV1 incorporates technologies that are also present in HEVC. Those technologies are subject to existing third-party patent rights and associated licensing obligations,' the filing reads. Dolby and patent pool administrator Access Advance contacted Snap for licenses via pools or bilateral deals, but Snap has continued without them. Access CEO Peter Moller stated, 'Labeling a codec “royalty-free” does not eliminate underlying patent rights.' This suit echoes InterDigital's action against Amazon Fire devices over AV1. The EU probed AOMedia's policy in 2022 but closed the case in 2023 for priority reasons, without ruling on compliance. Intellectual property commentator Florian Mueller told Ars Technica that Big Tech's royalty-free claims for AV1 do not override existing patents, potentially risking adoption. Dolby seeks a declaration against FRAND obligations and an injunction. Neither Dolby, Snap, nor AOMedia commented ahead of the report.
