"Antitrust enforcers are investigating whether MPEG LA, or its members, are trying to cripple an alternative format called VP8 that Google released last year— by creating legal uncertainty over whether users might violate patents by employing that technology, these people added."
(Emphasis mine). This is fair, I think. Basically, they are being investigated for spreading FUD against their competitor.
Imagine that you developed an application, and I'm your competitor. You're trying to sell your app to corporations. I call journalist and tell them that your app infringes patents (not mine, I don't have any patents). I also tell them that the patent pool is being assembled. I put a notice on my website: "Do you have any patents that [you app] might infringe? Let us know!", and let it hang there for a long long time. While there's an uncertainty, corporations won't buy your app. Anticompetitive? To me, yes.
Patent enforcement is not illegal, but it is illegal to misuse a patent for anticompetitive purposes.
The area of law where patent law and anti-trust law intersect is very complex, so I cannot explain it here, but suffice it to say there are situations where patents can be misused for anticompetitive purposes and this can result in violation of antitrust law.
Some examples may include situations where you have a patent for system A that rightfully grants you a monopoly on system A, but use that patent to get a monopoly on or control the distribution of system B which is not covered by your patent.
This is something that may apply in this case although I am not sure it does. MPEG-LA keeps its major license agreements secret, so we do not know what is happening.
As someone else pointed out, the one thing that makes this interesting is, instead of bothering to do the legal legwork first to PROVE they cover vp8, they simply make vague threats to scare people out of using it, which I highly doubt is how the patent system was meant to be used.
Are vague threats illegal? Do legal threats have to be specific? It seems like one of the most common threats I know of is, "I'm going to sue you!" It's usually not a specific, "I'm going to sue you based on violation of XYZ". It's usually a very vague statement. Is that generally illegal, but just not enforced?
