Yes I am still waiting for that answer. Maybe I am being dense but to me this is not a victory? If anything seems like a loss? In other words suspicions now are founded that VP8 was never free of patent infringement.

It's arguably a victory within the existing rules of the game. Taking it to an extreme - if Google paid a single cent in order to remove the threat of MPEG-LA related patent suits and in return massively increased adoption of VP8 and following specs, would that have been a victory? A dollar? Ten dollars? A million dollars? It's a victory for Google if the cost to them is less than the expected benefits of removing a barrier to adoption.

Of course, the flipside to this is that it's also a victory for the existing patent system. It's usually cheaper for people to settle than it is for them to fight a patent suit, even if they win. At the end you maybe get most of your costs back, and it's cost you several years of your competitors telling your potential customers that you're a patent infringer and if they implement the spec they could be next.

So yes, a real victory would require certainty over the patent status of VP8 without Google having had to pay anyone anything, but also without having to spend years in litigation to prove that. But that's not an option at the moment, and the fact that Google were able to negotiate a relatively wide-ranging and liberal license (without any admission of infringement) is arguably the best that's possible without significant changes in the law.