Five years ago this week… Weeks after launching AV1, AOMedia revealed to Faultline that it was on the ultra-defensive, setting up a World Council and Legal Defense Fund to prepare for sticky situations which might arise from the plethora of patented IP within the alliance. The royalty-free licensing group had drafted in legal and engineering experts to assess AV1 processing conducted independently by member companies (Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon and Cisco). The plan was that every member of the alliance would have to sign a patent agreement before joining, applying the same policy as the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), but companies would not have to be an AOMedia member to license the technology. — Qwilt and Cisco…