MP3 seems to be one of the cases where patents seem to have not hindered the spread of information. The inventor made a small amount of money, and decodes and encoders proliferated. MP3 dominated music. And there's no shortage of open source (which, I know, is not what RMS wants) code available.
This is not the catastrophic situation that I was told to expect from patentable file formats.
This is not the catastrophic situation that I was told to expect from patentable file formats.