I've never understood the objection to MPEGLA.

I'm neutral on patents* but this is probably the best environment for patents in the entire world. MPEGLA is a licensing agency, so there are no personal or political issues. They make money by increasing the number of licensees. Those who submit patents to them ofload a lot of work that they otherwise would have to engage in for marketing the patents.

Finally the patent pools allow for standards to be created and propagated under fair terms. Fierce competitors like Microsoft and Apple can participate together and have an incentive to contribute patents to the pool.

And as was otherwise mentioned the existence of the pool mitigates risk that there might be a patent you don't know about.

Everybody who participates in the pool wins, and the pool is a much more efficient mechanism of licensing patents than doing it one by one in an environment of uncertainty, or doing it at the end of a long litigation that you have lost and are thus pushed over the barrel.

Further, I don't understand why the risk of patents for VP8 is called FUD. I'm certain a good chunk of the patents in the current MPEGLA pool cover VP8 because of the nature of patents (they have to be broadly written) the nature of our patent system (things have to be patented, because even if you invented it, someone else can patent it if you don't) and the nature of video encoding (you're essentially forced by the nature of video and the desire to compress to recognize features of images that exist in multiple frames and then encode based on them, this is an essential component of MPEG-4 video & h.264, and unless a fundamental patent for this has expired, and all derivative improvements have also expired, which I doubt, h.264 patents are going to cover VP8 encoding, unless VP8 somehow does not use any feature extraction.)

Thus, MPEGLA will have a pool that people can go to license the VP8 patents. If google wants to contribute their patents (assuming they have some) to the pool then they will get licensing compensation. If they don't then that doesn't change the fact that MPEGLA is legitimately protecting the rights of the patent holders for patents that VP8 infringes on.

That VP8 infringes on patents is pretty much a sure thing-- unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how VP8 works, and even still, there are patents on many other aspects of video and video containers.

Don't be mad at the patent holders for protecting their work- they published it for everyone to benefit from in exchange.

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* If you've got a better idea for how intellectual property should be protected or not, then, please start a political movement. Don't go after people following he laws as they are. Given the existence of the system, companies must patent and defend their patents. And given that this is the state of the legal framework in the country, suing people for patent violation is perfectly legitimate. The patent is a trade- you reveal your solution in exchange for legal protection. If you cannot sue, then you are not getting the compensation you are promised in this system for revealing your invention. If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.