They're successful mostly because (many) end users ignore patents; at least the ones that don't work at large companies with dedicated legal departments (and targets on their back because they have actual money).
Further, that's why Vorbis, VP9, AV1 etc, show less adoption, even though they're free, for end users the other formats have been baked into hardware that only works with the closed ecosystems and the average guy can ignore the patents and continue to work with that non-free ecosystem.
I don't know if this counts though. It's not crippleware or control, it's a pretty modest nominal tax on a physical good (between 2 and 3%) that otherwise already costs money.
You could say the market pivoted away from things covered by the law into the area of the exceptions but that's a little too neoclassical for actual human behavior - I'd need to see significant direct evidence to support the idea that a 2% cost increase was both passed on to the consumer and the consumer made significant purchasing decisions from that price signal delta.
I'm going to guess that in practice, the 2% difference was absorbed in, for example, cheaper packaging, scaled manufacturing, permitting larger margins for QoS failures or by placing on cheaper areas of the distributor's shelf space as opposed to being directly transmitted to the actual consumer price of say $9.80 versus $9.99.
Even if it was directly transmitted, the majority of consumers aren't that discretionary with such small deltas. But this is another topic entirely.
Regardless, that's the only thing I can find that disputes my initial claim.
