Dolby Codecs, Legal Threats: Coda

Back in 2014, I wrote about how Dolby were requiring me to remove ac3 support from VLC Streamer for somewhat questionable legal reasons

I included the email I received from their representative about the price I would have to pay

You should also know that there are fees associated with becoming licensed.  Specifically, there is a $25,000 one-time initial fee and a recurring $5,000 annual maintenance fee.  There is also a per-unit royalty that has a tiered structure, due quarterly, based on annual total usage, as follows:

0-100,000 downloads at $0.99 per download

100,001-1,000,000 downloads at $0.67 per download

1,000,001+ downloads at $0.45 per download

I was interested to get a call from a lawyer working for Adobe recently. They were being sued by Dolby for something related to these patents.

Bizarrely, Dolby were arguing that their pricing levels were so super secret that they couldn’t even disclose them in court.

Adobe found my old post and argued that if they were published on the web – they couldn’t be that secret.

I don’t have any details about the case, but I know they settled and it went away. Hopefully my pricing info made the difference…