Same story as with fractal compression algorithms. Patents shouldn't last that long.
Yet AFAIK due to some patent being held by Stratasis that made only professional level horrendously expensive and proprietary 3D printers that never got any wide adoption, the 3D printing revolution was held a decade+ until the damned patent finally expired. And the rest is history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression
Slow to encode, and there's no reason it should perform better than DCTs or any other modern image codec that's built around being machine-friendly.
The reason fractal compression sometimes got much better compression ratios than DCTs is apparently that it did a better job of capturing the structure of the world (a prior probability distribution), more than anything about the quirks of visual perception. We know lots of basis functions that are a little better at giving us sparse bases than DCTs for low absolute error on real-world images, even before any kind of perceptual weighting. IFSs aren't quite linear basis functions (I mean they're normally "linear", but what's being transformed linearly is the (x, y) vector and not the (r,g,b) vector), and it wouldn't be terribly surprising if they could do better still. Particularly given past examples of them doing amazing.
How often will that happen? The existing system seems to massively favour keeping existing big companies big. A small inventor can easily ignored. Meaning, there's quite a difference between being right and ensuring a company does the right thing.
Some products (e.g. mobile phones) are covered by hundreds of patents. A small inventor having a huge benefit from patents? It maybe happens, but I really doubt the benefits outweighs the clear damage that patents are having.
What this means is that any practical implementation of an idea needs to be a multi-million dollar idea in order to be worth patenting. Otherwise you're just wasting money.
I.e., a patent that protects you against a later filer, but that’s it.
Patents are meant as a reward for making an invention, the deal being that you get a monopoly on this new invention for a while and in exchange you have to tell the public how to implement your invention. If you could patent known things that would defeat the whole point.
What changed is that until recently the US operated under a first-to-invent principle, so if two people invented the same thing and they both wanted a patent on it, the one who invented it first would get the patent. As you can imagine, proving when you invented something can be quite difficult at times, and the whole process can be messy. First-to-file just means that in such a situation, the first person to file wins, which puts the US rules in line with other countries and makes things much simpler.
The point is that with a patent, the small inventor can go on to raise further funds to exploit and defend the patent if necessary.
I’m not defending the patent system, but saying it’s too expensive doesn’t make much sense.
He used his political connections to extend his patent and only after that expired could the various improvements made by users (paricularly the cornish tin miners) be used more widely.
And as with anything that threatens the establishment, there's some right wing economist writing a paper about how it's all a myth:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658495
Looks like he works for the Cato Institute now so we should probably consider this alongside their climate change commentary in terms of baysian likelihood of truth.
But interestingly, he's mostly responding to libertarian economist who argue that IP in general is a government monopoly with all the stuff you'd associate with that: