That was an USA patent from Fraunhofer, who made quite some cash from mp3 license fees (100 000 000€ according to Wikipedia).
Presumably because it's much easier to get injunctive relief in Germany I've seen more codec related litigation there than anywhere else.
(*) Like many pieces of misinformation it has its roots in a seed of truth: Particularly between 1998 (State Street) and 2014 (CLS v Alice) the case law in the US supported software patents.
The real confusion is that "Software patents" is an obscure term of art which refers to patents specifically on software methods without any reference to a physical machine or good.
When non-patent-attorneys say "software patents" they mean something more like "something I could infringe by writing software". But clever drafting allows people to write patents that software causes an infringement of without it technically being a "software patent": The patent's claims language will say something like "A recorded media containing instructions..." or "A microprocessor programmed to...". And this has been true in the US and Europe through the whole span.
Which is why there is an awful lot of patent action impacting software in places where "software patents" don't exist, such as the US (as of right now) and Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern... - this?
>The patents were held to be invalid, because the claims were drawn to an abstract idea, and implementing those claims on a computer was not enough to transform that abstract idea into patentable subject matter.
