MPEG isn’t just a bit stream format. The magic is the encoding techniques. That is very hard to protect without patents, because the techniques are exposed in the bit stream formats. And ideally you want to have a reference implementation with source code so you can get lots of high quality interoperable implementations. Same thing with the algorithms underlying WiFi and LTE. Trade secrets don’t help because you can’t have interoperability without making it public. Copyright doesn’t help. The software is the easy part. It’s capital intensive to develop the algorithms.

Interested parties would develop these technologies, but they wouldn’t make them open. Where are the alternative models for developing something like MPEG? There is the Google/VP9 model, which is to bankroll the R&D it with advertising dollars. Then there is the BBC/Dirac model with public funding paid for by a mandatory tax. To me those models are worse and less sustainable.

IMO industry leaders have pressure to reinvest their profits in R&D and put it in their new products, regardless of whether they can get patent protection for them or not.

I'm not an expert in codecs or wireless protocols, but afaik most wireless telephony standards are practically trade secrets, requiring payment of tens of thousands of dollars to even read the spec.

And I can't say I'm really a fan of the situation where people are forced to buy Qualcomm chips because they hold key LTE patents which they're managed to get people worldwide to agree to use.

But one thing I do know about standards is that they often trademark their name, and then require certification and payment for use; it should be relatively straight forward to setup industry bodies like this where you cannot use the trademark Bluetooth without paying into the body, which pays for R&D.

Sure, you have to get creative and you can't just sneak something you patented into a standard and land in a billion dollar monopoly, but frankly, I'm not really crying for Qualcomm and co.

[EDIT]: By way of analogy: we don't let newspapers patent facts, even if they are the first to report them. This makes it hard for news orgs to protect their content, and while it was easier for news orgs pre-internet, Reuters, AP, NYT, BuzzFeed are all doing well. There's no need to prop up every industry.

> IMO industry leaders have pressure to reinvest their profits in R&D and put it in their new products, regardless of whether they can get patent protection for them or not.

They do. What they don’t have is any incentive to open up that R&D for competitors to use unless they have a way of monetizing it. Selling a patent license is better than many of the alternative such monetization models (e.g. Google’s model of developing Android for free so it can slurp down all the data pushed through Android phones).

As to standards essential patents—-the whole point is that you don’t have to buy the product from the same company that did the original R&D. You can buy someone else’s chip, and the original technology developer still gets compensated with a royalty. This is a system that works really well in a whole host of areas everyone depends on. MPEG, WiFi, LTE, Bluetooth, DDRn, PCI-E, all of these ecosystems are mediated by patents. Companies spend a lot of money developing the technology, then implemented who generally don’t have the expertise to develop this sort of technology themselves pay licenses to implement the standards essential patents. It works and it’s way better than the alternatives.

> IMO industry leaders have pressure to reinvest their profits in R&D and put it in their new products, regardless of whether they can get patent protection for them or not.

This has obvious free-rider problems for things like new video streaming protocols. Why contribute to the development of next generation codecs, for example, if you can just copy the most successful solution of your competitors and get 80% of the benefit for none of the cost?

(I say 80% because the competitor's solution will presumably not be totally optimized for your business needs)

Patents are effectively a mandatory tax, just mostly paid to private companies.

Yes, it’s a tax paid by the people who profit by making compatible implementations of technology to the people who spend money developing the technology. It’s an honest bi-lateral exchange of money for property rights.