Sadly, the best compression techniques are fairly obvious and have been patented. The economics of this space have always favored better codecs over licensing concerns. Savings in bandwidth often negate the cost benefits of a free codec. High end video recording/editing tools used by most content creators are expensive, such that a codec license amounts to only a small fraction of the cost. Pirates care about high quality and fast downloads. They don't care about licensing costs for obvious reasons.

H.265 merely standardizes on a set of the best known compression techniques that meet certain compression vs processing constraints. It just so happens that most of these techniques are patented. Which in turn is why MPEG-LA exists. This will continue to be true going forward. The only way to make a free codec viable is to fix the patent system. I'm all for patent reform, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I'd much rather discuss h265 tech here, and leave the patent debate for the numerous posts we're sure to continue to see on HN.