So how little money do you believe has been spent creating MPEG, H.264, H.265, and all the other codecs? Do you think these were created by a handful of people in a garage over a weekend?
Meetings for these codecs were more than 300 people and those were just representatives of larger groups. This is research that does require billions of dollars and thousands of experts working for years. That's not going to happen as a charity or by weekend hackers. Linus isn't going to get frustrated at the size of video files and take a week off to come up with a better codec.
Software patents created these video codecs by funding the research and development, and patents aren't long-term barriers as many of the early formats have expired or are expiring now. You want to use MPEG-1? Go ahead. Or if you want to leverage hundreds of thousands of man-hours experts put into improving on it for the next generation then for a few more years you'll need to pay for it to cover those costs. That's exactly how patents are supposed to work.