Everybody loses right to patent it. Which is fair.
In US someone else can still patent your invention if you didn't. That's where the extortion is to patent it.
ANS encoding was invented and published by it's inventory without patent explicitly for everybody to be able to use it.
And yet Microsoft just patented a subset of it. It was granted a patent on a thing they didn't invent and was already published for the explicit goal of leaving it patent free.
In theory that patent is not valid since it is based on something that was already published, but I agree that in practice some companies will pay to avoid going to court.
In US someone else can still patent your invention if you didn't. That's where the extortion is to patent it.
ANS encoding was invented and published by it's inventory without patent explicitly for everybody to be able to use it.
And yet Microsoft just patented a subset of it. It was granted a patent on a thing they didn't invent and was already published for the explicit goal of leaving it patent free.