More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

There is a pretty significant difference between the vague and untested theoretical risk presented by most patents, many of which were registered for purely investor-soothing or defensive purposes by ordinary companies which make ordinary products, and what you see in the codec space: Where the patents are widely and aggressively enforced and collected on, and where the royalty income is the primary or sole income for some of the patent holders.

Patents which are crated with the express intention of encumbering a format are a special case in another regard as well: The claims will usually exactly parallel some mandatory minutia of the format, allowing the patent to be hyper-specific thus making obtaining and enforcing the patent less costly, while removing the risk of invalidation due to prior art without diminishing the potent of the patent for its intended purpose in the slightest.

Furthermore, should a serious patent claim be raised against a browser, for example, then an update can be issued to avoid the issue and thus bound the damage. A patent which reads on a _format_ used for interchange is far more damaging. Moreover, you can choose to avoid software with known patent problems if your sensitivity to risk is great, but it's much harder to pick and choose what formats you work with because you're subjected to the choices other people make.

So— sure, patents are problems in many places but I think there are plenty of arguments supporting that the difficulty caused by patents is not uniformly distributed and codes deserve special attention in this area.