H.265 is a great example of software patents going wrong. As it was the first MPEG video standard created after the rise of widespread commercial video streaming, all the patent owners involved wanted to be able to get as much money as possible from the streaming companies. Because of this, we went from the relatively reasonable H.264 licensing terms (pay one patent pool a per-device licensing fee, capped at a total royalty payment of $14 million) to H.265 being covered by three separate patent pools. Between all of them you have to pay royalties on decoding hardware, software, and per-item encoded, and some of the pools don't have caps on royalties. Additionally, some major patent holders aren't in any pools and you have to work out deals with them individually. Here's a summary of the H.265 licensing situation: https://www.slashcam.de/images/news/HEVC-Patent-Pools-14134_...
The result is that H.265 hasn't gotten much commercial adoption (the one major use is 4K Blu-Ray). Instead, most major streaming and tech companies have been pushing AV1, which doesn't have licensing fees and takes a "mutually assured destruction" approach to patent enforcement (the AV1 patent license states that if any patent holder tries to sue an AV1 user for patent infringement, they automatically lose the rights to all AV1 patents, opening them up to a countersuit).
The result is that H.265 hasn't gotten much commercial adoption (the one major use is 4K Blu-Ray). Instead, most major streaming and tech companies have been pushing AV1, which doesn't have licensing fees and takes a "mutually assured destruction" approach to patent enforcement (the AV1 patent license states that if any patent holder tries to sue an AV1 user for patent infringement, they automatically lose the rights to all AV1 patents, opening them up to a countersuit).