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.
For many years, nobody shipped implementations of MP3 at all; there are still Linux distributions today that don't provide support for MP3 out of the box. Many don't support MP4/h264, either.
In fact, the MP3 patents are directly responsible for spurring the development of Ogg Vorbis, which is arguably superior in some ways (see other comments). From Wikipedia:
> Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[8][9] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[10][11]
This is interesting because "innovation through forced workarounds" has long been one of the ways patents are said to be beneficial. Ogg is a prime example.
This is not the catastrophic situation that I was told to expect from patentable file formats.