America = Sick joke of a patent system
While I agree with this sentiment, I think you (and many others on this thread) are applying it to the wrong issue.
First, the MP3 patent is not a US patent, it is an EU patent.Second, it is not technically even a software patent, but a patent on an audio compression mechanism. Even if you write your own code to implement this mecahnism, you are violating the patent. In the US, the EU, or anywhere else in the devloped world.
Notice that these first two points mean that the MP3 patent bears no relation to the "US allows software patents = evil, rest of world does not = good" issue.
Finally, third, if ever there was a non-trivial idea that deserves patenting, the MP3 compression mechanism is it. It's not just math, it's psyco-acoustics. Said differently, MP3 is not a compression mechanism for arbitrary data, it works only for audio data. It is based on measuring which specific artifacts are not audible to the human ear/brain. Making it work took many years of resarch, measurements on many different subjects, and a great deal of money. Frauenhofer did not discover it by accident, but by directly these resouces specifically at this problem.
The above paragraph does not mean that I don't believe that there are many trivial and bogus patents. There are, and the patent system in the US needs reforming. But the MP3 patent is not a good example for use in that debate.