There's nothing proprietary about Lightening Network. Lightning network was started by a startup, who published the paper, there are several open source implementations of it, and to my knowledge there's no actual involvement of Blockstream. Blockstream has their own solution (that doesn't need segwit right now) called Liquid.

Liquid Network and Lightening Network are different things and work in a different ways. A new version of liquid that uses some of he lightening technology enabled by segwit is probably in Blockstreams plans... but there are multiple competing open source implementations of Lightening Network being worked on.

Please link to the patents on the lightening network. I don't think you can.

There is no current network congestion. Free transactions are clearing after awhile and very low fee transactions are clearing right away.

All of the congestion of the past 3 months was from a spam campaign being run by the people who claim "bitcoin doesn't scale without larger blocks" ignoring that Segwit increases block size AND increases efficiency in using that capacity.