A little more on timing:
Going back to the press release issued by Max Sound about the lawsuit in Germany, it appears to have been claimed that Google and others were infringing European Patent, EP 2026277, and violating trade secrets, with such infringement/violations to be found in H.264.
The European patent was filed in January 2002.
H.264 has a history which predates 2002, although H.264 had a number of iterations and improvements over the years that followed.
I'm confused though to see in a review of the claim filed in Santa Cruz that it related not to H.264 but to VP8.
It is claimed that in 2011 it was discovered by VSL engineers that certain features of VP8 appeared to infringe VSL property, (VP8 having gone open source in May 2010).
It is contended that in the Spring of 2010, Google had access to VSL technology, and had signed a NDA in April 2010 for a term of four years. (This is the post it note incident alleged). It is thus contended that Google violated the NDA, and that features of VSL technology have been incorporated in VP8 and elsewhere.
If Wikipedia counts, VP8 was first released by On2 Technologies in September, 2008, as On2 TrueMotion VP8, replacing its predecessor, VP7.
Google acquired On2 in February 2010, or two months prior to entering in to the NDA alleged, with VSL in April 2010. And one month after that, VP 8 became open source.
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