It is unencumbered, unless there's a ton of money to be made by suing them. Same goes for Theora. When some deep-pocketed hardware manufacturer dares put one of these "unencumbered" algorithms into its hardware, then we will see. But I doubt they'll dare.
Let them present their patents and try to sue, then you can say something is encumbered. Until now they engaged in empty threats and demagogy. They make tons of money by dominating the market, and when some potential completion shows up they try to prevent its adoption by spreading empty FUD. So it has nothing to do with patent encumbrance, it's just about their greed and thirst for market domination.
They won't present their patents until there's a big haul of cash to be extracted. There won't be a big haul of cash to be extracted until some deep-pocketed manufacturer implements the algorithms. Which they likely won't do because they understand the same thing I do -- the system is rigged.
They won't present their patents until there's a big haul of cash to be extracted.
Algorithms are already implemented and software which uses them is distributed broadly. Where are their court cases? Until those patent trolls (trolls as in spreading FUD) actually show what those patents are, they can't say that anything is encumbered. And they themselves have no idea about what they are. So whatever lies they spread now, even if it comes from Jobs, is simply irrelevant.
You can easily find VP8 used on Youtube. Not big enough? Those predators wouldn't hesitate to sue, if they'd have something to bite with. But they have no teeth.
You can come up with any kind of arguments or guesses about why they don't sue, but the bottom line - they didn't provide any proofs, so their FUD doesn't worth anyone's time, and these codecs can be considered unencumbered and free to use (and that's what's happening to their displeasure).
According to another comment further down the page, Tegra 3 and OMAP4 have "hardware" VP8 decoding support. I've also heard that a patent holder can't sue for damages that occur long after they were made aware of infringement (it would be nice if one of HN's regular lawyers would jump in and define estoppel).
There are far more interesting and HN-worthy things to discuss than the non-Opus-specific fact that the patent system is broken, like its potential applications in WebRTC, the hybrid design that merges Celt and Silk, the fact that having a conversation with someone 50 feet away using Opus can have lower latency than just shouting at them (as demonstrated by Mumble's use of Celt beating the speed of sound down a hallway), etc.
