In other words, this isn't really about innovation or "theft of ip", but suppressing competition, more evidence of the abuse of the patent system.
As to why a reasonable person would want to not use H.264? It's simple. Organizations like Mozilla cannot ship software with IP encumbered codecs. WebRTC doesn't say that you cannot use H.264, it allows you to negotiate the codec, this debate over what is the minimum fallback codec that everyone has to support.
Given that Microsoft/Skype/Nokia have been against the IETF WebRTC proposal, you can gather for very good business reasons. A non-IP encumbered spec widely deployed would be a threat to Skype/Cisco/Nokia et al who have commercial video conferencing stuff, it would commoditize the market for video chat and make it a trivial matter.
The established players only have to gain by delaying an open spec. I think even if H264 were used over VP8, there Microsoft and others would find other reasons to stop it.
Well, I guess it looks like they’re suppresing competition, but if Nokia’s correct that they own patents on VP8, then VP8 is patent encumbered and promoting it just creates fragmentation. This argument seems kind of tautological if Nokia’s the only company with patents on VP8 that Google does not have a license to, but otherwise it seems reasonable. They could offer to license their VP8 patents at the same cost they offer their H.264 patents at, but instead they’re choosing not to license them at all. What other motive would they have for “suppressing competition” if they could charge the same to license their patents either way?
Realistically, everything is patent encumbered. It's probably impossible to write anything that has more than 1,000 lines of code that isn't. That's not a good argument for defeating a spec, it's a good argument for opposing patent trolling and reforming the patent system.
Clearly, Nokia, which used to be a leader in the mobile market, is on is on a downhill slide and like Kodak was with film, and is turning to their patent portfolio to slow down the slide into the abyss. This is typical in the industry, when companies start losing marketshare to competition, they start getting litigious.
For example, they are suing HTC over a 1995 patent on "tethering". Really? The entire internet going back to the 80s is about tethering. I used to tether my Amiga off of a PC via a null-modem cable to get internet access. This is a pretty offensive patent, in the "disgusting" sense. Apple similarly sued poor old HTC over a 90s patent on using regular expressions to detect phone numbers in a page and make them clickable.
Legal or not, the whole idea of "ownership" of this kind is deeply disturbing to me. The new generation of entrepreneurs have to contend with an environment that was far more litigious than it was in the dawn of personal computing, and often the very same players who benefited early on by lack of trolls, are now some of the biggest.
The only glimmer of light for me is that by the time my son is old enough to make his way in the world, most of this crap will have expired.
As to why a reasonable person would want to not use H.264? It's simple. Organizations like Mozilla cannot ship software with IP encumbered codecs. WebRTC doesn't say that you cannot use H.264, it allows you to negotiate the codec, this debate over what is the minimum fallback codec that everyone has to support.
Given that Microsoft/Skype/Nokia have been against the IETF WebRTC proposal, you can gather for very good business reasons. A non-IP encumbered spec widely deployed would be a threat to Skype/Cisco/Nokia et al who have commercial video conferencing stuff, it would commoditize the market for video chat and make it a trivial matter.
The established players only have to gain by delaying an open spec. I think even if H264 were used over VP8, there Microsoft and others would find other reasons to stop it.