Liquid Network and Lightening Network are different things and work in a different ways. A new version of liquid that uses some of he lightening technology enabled by segwit is probably in Blockstreams plans... but there are multiple competing open source implementations of Lightening Network being worked on.
Please link to the patents on the lightening network. I don't think you can.
There is no current network congestion. Free transactions are clearing after awhile and very low fee transactions are clearing right away.
All of the congestion of the past 3 months was from a spam campaign being run by the people who claim "bitcoin doesn't scale without larger blocks" ignoring that Segwit increases block size AND increases efficiency in using that capacity.
> Today we are excited to announce some important steps we are taking on the patent front, why these defensive steps are necessary, and our hope that others will see merit in our approach and follow our lead.
...
> Our Patent Pledge assures developers and users of our technology that we will not sue them for patent infringement, provided they comply with the terms and conditions of our pledge...
https://blockstream.com/2016/07/19/blockstream-defensive-pat...
Edit: Here is a discussion of Blockstream's patent application for side car design,
> The application, submitted on 9th May and published earlier this week, outlines “systems and methods...for transferring an asset from a parent chain to a sidechain”.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-blockstream-patent-sidechain...
Here is blockstream talking about Lightening,
> Blockstream’s work on the Lightning protocol began two years ago with the intention of enabling new applications and developing new use cases that could help further the adoption of Bitcoin and related technologies
https://blockstream.com/2015/09/01/lightning-network.html
Also presumably if segwit activates then Liquid is no longer needed?
Edit: The relationship between Blockstream and Lightning is underscored, by the fact that the largest contributor to the specification is a Blockstream employee (Rustee Russell),
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/graphs/con...
No, it is not only open source but a healthy mailing list with a lot of interested parties.
> lead by Blockstream
No, Poon and Dryja are not employed by the company Blockstream. The latter seems to be more focused on their sidechain solutions.
> the work is even patent-encumbered
No, there is nothing to suggest this. Patents have to be public at some point.
lighting is designed to be able to farm out channel enforcement to other nodes on the network to prevent cheating while preserving privacy.
lighting does require more block space to operate globally than is available. It still scales better than bitcoin though.
They state the ip is for defensive purposes only - however that is questionable given that anything they implement, automatically becomes prior-art. It is also contrary to the spirit and practice of the majority of crypto/alt projects.
It is unreasonable to attack miners for having interests, without disclosing that other interests may benefit from the current levels of network congestion that a skeptic would say are caused by having artificially small blocks.