[kindall]

US patent laws sensibly state that only individuals, not corporations, may be awarded patents.

Unfortunately, most companies require that any patent awarded to an engineer in their employ is automatically assigned to the company.

Get rid of that loophole and employees will be able to license their patents as they see fit. Of course this is fraught with practical difficulties, but some kind of compromise could be reached.

Never happen, obviously.

[amluto]

Do you really want to try to get individual licenses from every single person who worked on video codecs from in the last 20 years so you can legally compress video?

[grishka]

While that would be somewhat harder, I bet most engineers are much less greedy than companies that employ them.

[lolc]

I see you are unfamiliar with the Wright brothers patent war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war