MPEG chair and co-founder Leonardo Chiariglione has courted the limelight lately by posting two dramatic and despairing blogs warning that success of the Alliance for Open Media’s (AOMedia) royalty free codec model would be a disaster not just for his organization but the video industry as a whole. It would destroy incentives for technology companies to develop and contribute intellectual property (IP) for the common good of the industry and its users, he contended. He accused “Non-Practicing Entities”, or NPEs, which are patent license holders with interest in extracting money from their IP, but no intention of developing products from it, of dragging down the whole MPEG movement. They had become increasingly aggressive in extracting value from their IP and…