Mozilla have just published a brief statement that they have taken legal advice before they chose to support Ogg Theora/Vorbis natively in the Firefox codebase. Seems like the risk of submarine patents was not large enough to hold back.

Apple and Microsoft should follow this example, undertake their own patent risk assessment (rather than hiding behind Nokia), and make an informed decision on whether or not to support Ogg Theora in their browsers.

The old excuse that there hasn’t been a large player in the market yet that supports the codec is now not true any longer. The ball is in your court to show us better arguments for not supporting the codec!