Dolby Laboratories has sued Snap Inc. in U.S. and Brazilian courts over alleged patent infringement tied to the AV1 and HEVC video codecs. The suits were announced March 24, 2026. They are the first enforcement actions of their kind against an AV1 implementer.
The lawsuits, filed through Access Advance's Video Distribution Patent Pool (VDPP), strike at an assumption baked into years of streaming infrastructure decisions: that AV1, the open video compression standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), is genuinely free to use without licensing fees. A patent licensing administrator that manages intellectual property practiced by video codec implementations, Snap has been using AV1 without securing the required licenses.
The core legal argument exposes a structural tension in how AV1 was built. AOMedia, whose founding members include Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix, designed AV1 as a royalty-free alternative to licensing-heavy codecs like HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding).
The alliance's members pledged not to assert patents they hold against AV1 users. AOMedia does not own every patent that a real-world AV1 implementation necessarily practices. Dolby, which is not an AOMedia member bound by that pledge, claims its intellectual property is among those patents, and that Snap's use of AV1 in Snapchat infringes on them.
How to Resolve the Dispute?
Access Advance noted that a license through its VDPP would resolve the dispute, positioning the lawsuit as a licensing negotiation by other means rather than a bid to remove AV1 from the market.
Snap is a large but hardly unique AV1 user. YouTube, Netflix, and a broad range of video-streaming services have adopted AV1 precisely because of its royalty-free reputation and superior compression efficiency compared to older codecs. If Dolby prevails, or if other patent holders in the VDPP follow suit against additional companies, every platform operating on the same assumption faces the same exposure.
The signals elsewhere in the industry are pointed. In February 2026, Amazon Web Services quietly removed patent infringement protection for media codec technology from its service terms, according to The Register, effectively shifting liability for codec patent claims onto AWS customers. That change preceded Dolby's action against Snap by roughly six weeks, and it drew little public attention at the time.
Dolby's broader enforcement posture reinforces the pattern. The Unified Patent Court (UPC), the European Union's centralized patent tribunal, granted Dolby a preliminary injunction against Roku over standard essential patents in a separate proceeding, marking the court's first such ruling in a standard essential patent case. The same court issued a ruling granting Dolby an injunction and damages against Turkish electronics manufacturer Arçelik over Opus audio codec patents. Taken together, the actions sketch a company actively pressing its intellectual property claims across multiple jurisdictions and codec formats.
The case places Snap in an uncomfortable position: a social media, platform with a declining share price, now defending simultaneous litigation on two continents over technology it almost certainly adopted in good faith. Whether that good faith constitutes a viable legal defense, or whether Snap ultimately acquires an Access Advance license, will shape how the rest of the industry responds. For streaming platforms that have spent years building infrastructure around AV1's supposed cost-free status, the Snap proceedings are worth watching very closely.
