History
VP8 was first released by On2 Technologies on September 13, 2008, replacing its predecessor, VP7.
After Google acquired On2 in February 2010, calls for Google to release the VP8 source code were made. Most notably, the Free Software Foundation issued an open letter on March 12, 2010, asking Google to gradually replace the usage of Adobe Flash Player and H.264 on YouTube with a mixture of HTML5 and a freed VP8.
On May 19, 2010, at its Google I/O conference, Google released the VP8 codec software under a BSD-like license and the VP8 bitstream format specification under an irrevocable free patent license. This made VP8 the second product from On2 Technologies to be opened, following their donation of the VP3 codec in 2002 to the Xiph.Org Foundation, from which they derived the Theora codec. In June 2010, Google amended the VP8 codec software license to the 3-clause BSD license after some contention over whether the original license was actually open source.
In February 2011 MPEG LA invited patent holders to identify patents that may be essential to VP8 in order to form a joint VP8 patent pool. As a result, in March the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) started an investigation into MPEG LA for its role in possibly attempting to stifle competition.
In July 2011 MPEG LA announced that 12 patent holders had responded to its call to form a VP8 patent pool, without revealing the patents in question, and despite On2 having gone to great lengths to avoid such patents.
In November 2011, the Internet Engineering Task Force published the informational RFC 6386, VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide.
In March 2013, MPEG LA announced that it had dropped its effort to form a VP8 patent pool after reaching an agreement with Google to license the patents that it alleges "may be essential" for VP8 implementation, and granted Google the right to sub-license these patents to any third-party user of VP8 or VP9. This deal has cleared the way for possible MPEG standardisation as its royalty-free internet video codec, after Google submitted VP8 to the MPEG committee in January 2013.
Since March 2013 Nokia has asserted a patent claim against HTC and Google for the use of VP8 in Android in a German court.
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