Dolby sues Snapchat over video codecs, raising questions about AV1's 'open and royalty-free' status.

On March 23, 2026, Dolby filed a lawsuit against Snap, the developer and operator of Snapchat, alleging that Snapchat's video conversion, encoding, and decoding processes infringe on Dolby's patents. The central issue in this lawsuit is whether AV1 incorporates Dolby's patented technology, raising questions once again about the 'royalty-free' nature of AV1.

AV1's open, royalty-free promise in question as Dolby sues Snapchat over codec - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-free-promise-in-question-as-dolby-sues-snapchat-over-codec/

AV1 is a video codec standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), and has been gaining popularity as an open and royalty-free alternative to HEVC/H.265 and other formats. AOMedia includes Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, and the organization explains that AV1 is a standard developed under a royalty-free patent policy.

Google and Netflix-led video codec 'AV1' officially released, raising hopes for the widespread adoption of 4K streaming - GIGAZINE

Dolby and its parent company hold over 22,000 patents worldwide, including a large collection of patents related to video encoding and decoding. Snapchat is a video sharing service, and Snap uses advanced video codecs such as HEVC (H.265) and AV1 to convert videos sent by users in order to deliver them optimally to a variety of devices and communication environments.

Dolby alleges that Snap infringed four of its patents in these processes: Patent No. 10855990 relating to prediction between color planes, Patent No. 9924193 relating to block merging and skip mode support, Patent No. 9596469 relating to sample sequence coding for low-latency processing, and Patent No. 10404272 relating to an entropy coding mechanism.

According to the lawsuit, AV1 reuses technical concepts already established in the preceding HEVC, and these are alleged to involve third-party patent rights and licensing obligations. Dolby maintains that while it has agreed to license HEVC under appropriate terms, it has not donated any of its inventions or agreed to AOMedia's policies in the development of AV1, and therefore has no contractual licensing obligations related to AV1.

Access Advance, as the administrator of a patent pool that includes patents from companies such as Dolby, has been urging Snap to obtain a license since August 2025, but Dolby claims that Snap continues to use Dolby's patented technology without permission.

Florian Müller, an intellectual property expert, states that even if a major tech company declares a particular technology to be royalty-free, this does not automatically extinguish any legal rights associated with it.

The risk of patent infringement is high between codecs that use similar technical methods, and companies such as Nokia and InterDigital have sued manufacturers and distributors over the use of HEVC and AV1.

In addition to a jury trial, Dolby is seeking damages and an injunction against the encoding and decoding of AV1. They are also asking the court to confirm that Dolby itself has no obligation to license AV1 to 'everyone under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms,' or, if such an obligation exists to some extent, that they have already negotiated in good faith with Snap and fulfilled that obligation.

This lawsuit concerns not only whether Snap infringed the patent, but also whether AV1 is truly a standard that can be used with confidence without additional patent fees, and what kind of licensing conditions companies using it will be required to meet in the future. The outcome of this case could affect the widespread adoption of AV1.

Dolby and Snap did not respond to requests for comment from the IT news site Ars Technica. A spokesperson for AOMedia stated that they had received a letter of inquiry from Ars Technica but had not yet responded at the time of writing.