Google shores up WebM standard against patent claims

Google has set up a patent pooling organisation to help protect its WebM video standard against legal attack.

The WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) group includes Google and 16 other participants, which have agreed to cross-licence all technologies required without royalties. Cisco, AMD, Samsung and Mozilla are among the first companies to sign up.

"WebM CCL members are joining this effort because they realise that the entire web ecosystem - users, developers, publishers and device makers - benefits from a high-quality, community developed, open source media format," said Google on the WebM blog.

"We look forward to working with CCL members and the web standards community to advance WebM's role in HTML5 video."

Google announced last year that it was looking to offer a free, open source video standard to rival the H.264 standard used in HTML5, which requires royalties and cannot be used in open source code.

Mozilla and Opera have signed up to support the standard VP8 codec used by WebM, while Microsoft and Apple maintain that H.264 is the better standard.

The move looks to be an attempt by Google to avoid the current patent problems it faces with Android on the WebM standard. The company changed its WebM licensing terms in June to avoid legal issues.