A non-lossy aka lossless codec without patent-restrictions for audio?
FLAC is the de facto standard, particularly, notice from the latter link:


  The specification of the stream format can be implemented by anyone
  without prior permission (Xiph.org reserves the right to set the FLAC
  specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC
  format nor any of the implemented encoding / decoding methods are
  covered by any patent. It also means that the reference implementation
  is free software. The source code for libFLAC and libFLAC++ is
  available under the BSD license, and the sources for flac, metaflac,
  and the plugins are available under the GNU General Public License. 
  
  In
  its stated goals, the FLAC project encourages its developers not to
  implement copy prevention features of any kind.[5]