AV1 is better than HEVC, is not patented, and was invented by companies interested in conserving bandwidth out of need. So yes, things get invented without patents.
AV1 is better than HEVC? I've never heard this claim. Does AV1 even exist in final form yet?
Is it going to use more battery than HEVC? VP9 uses much more battery than H.264. Even when both have hardware decoders, VP9 uses a bit more juice. It's the computational complexity difference. Of course HEVC probably uses more juice than h.264 as well, but VP9 is notoriously inefficient and it would suck if AV1 was less energy efficient than HEVC.
>AV1 is better than HEVC, is not patented,
Being royalty free does not mean it is not patented.
IIRC they did patent it to use as a threat against trolls, but promise never to enforce it against fair users.
This is just a restatement of the fact that codec patents exist.
When the state of the art advances because of improvements A to Z and A to W are in the public domain, the proprietary codecs are still "better" because they use A to W plus X, Y and Z which the open source codecs can't use because of the patents.
The real question is whether the patented things would have been invented without the patents. But the answer is probably yes, because the industry is full of huge companies like Google and Netflix that directly benefit from improving compression regardless of whether they can sell it to anyone else.