[TrueDuality]

There is an inherent disconnect in your argument. Concrete implementations of software deserve protection sure, and do under copyright law. Software patents are attempting to reserve concepts and generally only hurt innovation by restricting other unrelated ideas from using a technique even if they came up with the algorithm entirely in a white box. History has shown time after time of simultaneous development of ideas once all the pieces are available (just look at Calculus).

This algorithm is a great example as its a general use encoding mechanism. If I develop software to encode and decode radio transmissions to a satellite using it, patenting it will prevent it from being using for say image encoding and decoding across the web. That use has zero impact on my concrete implementation or my commercial sector.

Even for overlapping industries, if there are zero patents, and two competing companies independently come to the same technological solution what is the justification for being able to patent that? If they didn't come to it independently because its available publicly on the web, then its prior art and shouldn't be patent-able anyway. If one reversed engineered the other solution and reproduced it, that's perfectly legal for other industries under certain circumstances and is explicitly allowed under the DMCA. I'm not arguing its right, but if that is supposed to be illegal patents as designed are the wrong tool for enforcement.

This isn't a patent covering a specific use of a specific algorithm for a specific industry (which even then I don't think should be patent-able) but the general algorithm itself restricting ALL uses of it. This is an existing concept that was intended to be open, already exists in the real world, and is on route to becoming part of international standards being gobbled up by Microsoft. There does not appear to be a significant or meaningful contribution to the work in this patent and should really have been rejected due to prior art.

Saying the original author should have patented this is also facile as that takes an enormous amount of resources that isn't available to most lone developers, or researchers, especially when the intent is to give it away freely to world.

[dylan604]

The intent of filing a patent to give away freely is specifically to protect against someone else filing the patent. It can be expensive, but not prohibitively so if you're willing to do some of the leg work yourself.

[TrueDuality]

In this case it's an international patent as the original author is not based in or from the US which adds complications. That aside you're looking at a minimum of $500 in patent office fees alone. That's probably fairly reasonable if that was all it is, and if you can get it right on the first try it might be. That cost is per submission and there is a huge schedule of fees that might expand that.

You're also glossing over the personal value of time expenditure to do that which even with professional guidance can take hundreds of hours. It is absolutely prohibitively expensive for something someone is going to give away for free and even most small independent companies.

There should be no reason that a donated public idea or concept should require any expenditure for protection.