Someone "skilled in the art" can take the descriptions of H.264 and produce a coder and a decoder without copying anything.
Isn't this exactly the same way people get around patents now? If I patent a Jack in the Box made using a spring and a box you could come along and make one using compressed air and a box.
The amount of protection H.264 would receive is directly related to how broadly derivative work is applied. Even at its broadest interpretation and everything that decoded or encode H.264 had to be licensed from them, at least it wouldn't stop other encodings from using almost all modern strategies to video encoding.
> Isn't this exactly the same way people get around patents now?
No, but the confusion comes from my ambiguous use of "copy".
Patents cover the use of mechanism X to accomplish purpose Y. Copying, for copyright purposes, is copying bytes (ignoring the whole look and feel thing). It's reasonably easy to use software mechanism X to accomplish purpose Y without copying bytes.
You seem to think that purpose should be limited to "H.264". If, for the purposes of argument, the relevant mechanism actually is useful for many other kinds of video encoding, it's unclear why that limitation makes sense. If the mechamism is worthy of protection for one protocol, why should it be unprotected when used in another?
Note that protocol ownership is different from mechanism ownership. The former is more akin to trademark, as in "real H.264" as opposed to some knockoff. (Coke vs Pepsi as it were.)
Isn't this exactly the same way people get around patents now? If I patent a Jack in the Box made using a spring and a box you could come along and make one using compressed air and a box.
The amount of protection H.264 would receive is directly related to how broadly derivative work is applied. Even at its broadest interpretation and everything that decoded or encode H.264 had to be licensed from them, at least it wouldn't stop other encodings from using almost all modern strategies to video encoding.