To a certain extent yes. This is only true on frequencies allowing digital voice encoding and they technically are still required to publish the working of the codec and how to identify them even if they are patent encumbered and you can't legally resell or distribute something to decode them.

These protections are to ensure the FCC / government are always able to decode amateur transmissions. These aren't protections for the operators themselves.

I completely agree with your sentiments though, the amateur bands should not allow proprietary commercialization.

Yeah it's a bit of a compromise there it looks like. At the time the only reasonable codecs that existed were proprietary and allowing them with the stipulation that the patents be available on a 'reasonable and non-discriminatory' basis so anyone could make a commercial radio based on the codecs.

At least with a proprietary codec with that patent restriction anyone can still go out and buy a compatible radio and jump right on. And if the improvement to capabilities is large enough the trade off is worth it. It's not ideal but it's much better than allowing encryption where the transmissions aren't accessible to anyone by design.

Been wondering why some of the radios cost way too much and now I am left wondering how much cheaper they would be if those patented codecs were banned or forced to be open for implementation.

The AMBE-3000 vocoder chip (used for pretty much all of the digital modes, including D-STAR and DMR) retails for about $50, before volume discount.

Which is not a small mount of money, but isn't that bad given that most amateur radios (excluding the recent Chinese models) retail for ~$500, and commercial radios retail for $1,000+.

That said, I'm pretty sure everyone would prefer to move to Codec2, but the lack of hardware offerings is a problem. I'm looking forward to the day the first real SDR handheld transceiver comes out so this can be implemented by the open source radio community. It's clear that none of the radio manufacturers are interested in interoperability, much less adopting community standards.

At least there's open source implementations of AMBE nowadays.

This is a dead horse but it isn't encryption.

Yeah there's a big difference between encryption and a codec. Anyone can decode and use the proprietary digital voice codec with appropriate equipment which the licensing board has at least assured won't become a monopoly for one radio equipment company.