Legal Question in Technology Law in Illinois

Algorithms per se are not patentable. But most algorithms can be expressed in terms of what they do to hardware, and manipulating hardware can be patentable. A copyright offers some minimal protection, but minor edits can avoid copyright infringement. Trade secrecy is useful until the compression software is released and then is useless. You need to get a good software patent attorney to work this up in the right way to make it patentable. I am not a software specialist, but I can give you recommendations to some good ones. Alternatively, you can do a quick Google patent search (just go to Google and enter "advanced patent search" in the window and you will see the link to their patent search page) search for a software patent coming out of your North Chicago area.