[shmerl]

Yep, examples would be interesting. There are counter examples - like the open Opus audio codec, which was developed by collaboration of various engineers and which is state of art precisely because they weren't burdened by stupid patenting issues, and could instead concentrate on creating a beautiful technology.

[rayiner]

How is it a counter example? Open Opus is built on patented technologies that are licensed royalty free by the original inventors (Broadcom, Xiph.org, Microsoft, etc). It certainly wasn't cheap to develop--the development cost is just being subsidized so the end result can be given out freely.

[kkowalczyk]

"Patented" doesn't equal "was expensive to develop".

In the context of codecs we're actually seeing how it prohibits improvements of technology.

Broadly speaking (i.e. I'm sure there are counter-examples, but they are not significant in the big picture), people didn't patent compiler technology, and we had great progress in compiler technology.

People didn't patent database technology and we had great progress in database technologies, from both academic research and competition.

People didn't patent word processing technologies so that Google can re-implement Word functionality in the browser because none of the fundamental techniques have been patented. Again, lots of progress from competition.

For whatever reason, audio and video codecs are heavily patented and the technology is ludicrously outdated compared to what it could have been if we had progress from competition or academic work of free software implementations because the patents cover basic ideas in compression so no-one can build on them and patent holders have no incentive to improve the technology because it's much easier (and more profitable) to just collect royalty checks.

However, developing video codecs isn't any more expensive than developing databases or compilers or word processors.

See e.g. h264 encoder which is an open-source effort by few amateurs that is widely regarded as being of better quality than commercial offering costing thousands of dollars (because of patent monopolies, not because they were so expensive to develop).