Nokia said it will not license any of its patents for components of the VP8 standard, in order to block Google’s plans to use the technology in its open source project WebM.
The Finnish mobile maker sent a submission to the Internet Engineering Task Force listing 64 patents and 22 pending applications, which it says are relevant to VP8.
Nokia said that it not prepared to license any of the patents to Google or any other interested party for free.
In a statement to FOSS Patents, a Nokia spokesman said the company believes that open and collaborative efforts for standardisation are in the best interests of consumers, innovators and the industry as a whole.
"We are now witnessing one company attempting to force the adoption of its proprietary technology, which offers no advantages over existing, widely deployed standards such as H.264 and infringes Nokia’s intellectual property," the spokesman said.
"As a result, we have taken the unusual step of declaring to the Internet Engineering Task Force that we are not prepared to license any Nokia patents which may be needed to implement its RFC6386 specification for VP8, or for derivative codecs."
VP8 is a video compressing technology which was developed by On2 Technologies in 2008 and was acquired by Google in 2010.
Google is hoping to make VP8 a worldwide standard which it uses in WebM along with open source audio codec Vorbis.
