Comment by tliltocatl

> Patents are designed to protect costly research

I'd argue that how they should have been, but the reality is quite the opposite. The patent framework is all about novel ideas rather than costly research, even though ideas aren't any valuable anymore - the easy stuff that is cheap to reproduce once the idea is known is already discovered.

Multimedia codecs and similar stuff are pretty patent-worthy (costly research) but their value is an exponential function of their adoption, and hence the unencumbered one always wins. Same with basically everything else.