Opus is a decade old, any patents would have to be filed before then or Opus would be prior work, and they're issued only for 20 years, right? At least for the software, which they claim not to be going after (but who'd trust a software patent lawyer). Any software implementations such as in VirtualBox, who just switched back to Vorbis from Opus, would be perfectly safe in at most ten years, perhaps already today. Am I understanding this right, at least for the software part?
Most of Opus is quite a bit older than that too a decade is for the final standard but the project began in earnest in 2007 and many components came from earlier work.
