As one of the people that helped start CCCP and was involved extensively through almost its entire lifespan, I think you misunderstand what it means to be "free" in this case. CCCP was "free as in beer" but not "free as in speech", /many/ of the codecs in CCCP were patent encumbered, but were included because there were open-source implementations of them by authors that didn't care about those patents, and many of the licensing arrangements didn't effectively apply to end-users (either due to language or care to prosecute). CCCP also almost exclusively included /decoders/, but /encoders/ are much more likely to be targeted by licensing authorities.

We started CCCP because at the time, anime fansubs were predominantly traded on P2P filesharing services like Kazaa, Gnutella, eDonkey, Direct Connect, and later Bittorrent. The most popular codec pack at the time was K-Lite / Kazaa Codec Pack which was a complete and utter mess, and specifically for fansubbing, it was hard to get subtitles to work properly unless they were hard embedded. Soft-subbing allowed for improvements, and there were a lot of improvements to subtitling in the fansubbing community over the years, one of the biggest came when the Matroska (MKV) container format came about, that allowed arbitrarily different formats/encodings to share a single media container, and the community shifted almost entirely to ASS formatted subtitles, but because an MKV could contain many different encodings, any given MKV file may play correctly or not on any given system. CCCP was intended to provide an authoritative, canonical, single-source way to play fansubbed anime correctly on Windows, and we achieved that objective.

But let's be clear, nobody involved was under any illusions that the MPEG-LA or any other license holders of for instance h264 were fans of our community or what we're doing. Anime fansubbing at all came out of piracy of foreign-language media into the English market via the Internet and P2P filesharing. None of us gave a shit, and the use of Soviet imagery in the CCCP was exactly a nod to the somewhat communist ideal that knowledge and access to media should be free, and that patent encumbering codecs and patenting software isn't just stupid, it's morally wrong. I still strongly feel software patents are evil.

Nonetheless, at no point was CCCP through it's life fully legal/licenses appropriately for usage, and effectively nobody cared, not even the licensing authorities, because the existence of these things made their licenses for encoders more valuable for companies producing media, as it was easier for actual people to consume.