You have missed the point, a video encoder isn’t just math anymore than chemistry is just math.
Finding the methods is the discovery and there are a lot of experimental work that goes into video and audio encoding as well including perceptual measurements and actually coming with a method that can be efficiently implemented in both software and hardware.
There are plenty of patents that don’t require nearly as much experimental or hard science work as developing a new encoding method.
This isn’t even about discovering anything new in mathematics although that can happen it’s about a novel implementation which does deserve patent protection whether you like it or not.
If one can literarily get a patent for a new pressure valve with just using a pen and paper or in even a better analogy a purely computerized simulation your argument simply falls apart.
The argument about it being non obvious is also has nothing to do with software as many things in computer science (since that is the field most relevant in this rather than software development) can be very much non obvious to experts in the field too.
And that is the gist of issue here the software implementation isn’t what is actually protected by the patent that might be protected by copy right. The patent itself covers a method which as you said can be implemented even on a piece of paper if you want to do things really slowly.
Designing a video compression algorithm is a purely mathematical task.
However you are right that for comparing different compression methods and for deciding which is the best method of several alternative methods having the same compression ratio, it is far better to do experiments with humans, instead of relying on some mathematical criterion, e.g. the distance between the original signal and the decompressed signal, according to some simple metric.
So I agree that a new video or audio compression algorithm may incorporate some new knowledge about a physical system, i.e. about the perceptual abilities of humans.
However that would justify patenting only some features of the algorithm that have the clear purpose of taking advantage of some characteristics of the human vision which have been newly discovered and described by the patent authors.
The valid claims cannot cover any mathematical tricks to improve the efficiency of the algorithm or any characteristics of the human vision that have already been exploited in the patents for older video compression algorithms.
I am pretty sure that no patent for video compression algorithms restricts itself to such reasonable patent claims.
Regarding software, the main problem is what makes you think that the fact that you happened to be the first to write a program that solves a certain problem, gives you any right to forbid to everybody else to solve the same problem.
It is guaranteed that there are thousands of other programmers who would solve the same programming problem as well as you or even better, without knowing anything about your solution, but they just happened to not face that problem before you.
Any kind of software is a combination of known elements, which have been used for the first time in the early times of the computer industry. Those early algorithms were much more innovative in comparison to the existing practice, than those that are patented now. Had they been patented, no software company, e.g. Microsoft, could have ever appeared and grown.
All those who have patented software in recent years stand on the shoulders of the early programmers who have not patented much more valuable ideas, which are now freely incorporated in the patented software.
I think you lack understanding on what exactly is being patented if you are continuing to repeat the “it’s just math”.
I honestly can’t fathom why software engineers think that they are unique every patent, every invention is built on prior knowledge this is why every patent has a whole section of prior art we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
But again video encoding patents have rarely anything to do with software they are far more generic than that and also predate software by decades.
Finding the methods is the discovery and there are a lot of experimental work that goes into video and audio encoding as well including perceptual measurements and actually coming with a method that can be efficiently implemented in both software and hardware.
There are plenty of patents that don’t require nearly as much experimental or hard science work as developing a new encoding method.
This isn’t even about discovering anything new in mathematics although that can happen it’s about a novel implementation which does deserve patent protection whether you like it or not.
If one can literarily get a patent for a new pressure valve with just using a pen and paper or in even a better analogy a purely computerized simulation your argument simply falls apart.
The argument about it being non obvious is also has nothing to do with software as many things in computer science (since that is the field most relevant in this rather than software development) can be very much non obvious to experts in the field too.
And that is the gist of issue here the software implementation isn’t what is actually protected by the patent that might be protected by copy right. The patent itself covers a method which as you said can be implemented even on a piece of paper if you want to do things really slowly.