For years, developers have struggled with whether to include codecs supporting MPEG-4 Part 2 in the standard repositories of their distributions. The reason was that the possibility of being charged royalties by rights holders could never be completely ruled out, and this uncertainty cast a shadow over implementation decisions. Patents in major countries had long since expired, but one patent in Brazil survived until July 19, 2026. Held by Siemens AG, this single patent—expiring in the 26th year since the standard was established—didn't outlive its usefulness because the technology had aged. Rather, a specific provision buried in Brazilian patent law left this one patent stranded in a gap in the system.
The Standard Behind DivX and Xvid, Fully Extinct After 26 Years
On July 19, 2026, the last valid patent worldwide tied to the MPEG-4 Part 2 (Visual) standard—developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (an international standards body for video and audio compression)—expired. The patent, registered in Brazil as BRPI0109962B1 and titled "Process for Storage and Processing of Image Information from Sequential Images," was held by Germany's Siemens AG. According to primary data from Google Patents, this was the sole remaining valid patent anywhere in the world, and with its expiration, MPEG-4 Part 2 became a fully patent-free standard.
MPEG-4 Part 2 was a video compression standard established around 2000, and its two implementations—DivX and Xvid—supported the video-sharing culture of the 2000s. Behind the scenes of ripping DVD movies down to a few CD-Rs' worth of data and trading them through forums and file-sharing software, this codec was doing the work. Counting from the standard's establishment, 26 years have now passed—and the patent for a standard that had long since ceded its mainstream position to successors like H.264, HEVC, and AV1 has finally disappeared.
During the mid-2000s, when this standard was in active use, broadband connections and video streaming services were still in their developmental stages. DivX and Xvid could achieve high compression ratios with relatively light processing, making encoding and decoding feasible at practical speeds even on personal computers. This matched the era's need to shrink video files for sharing. The codec symbolizes an age before streaming became the dominant mode of distribution.
For a long time, this codec's patent portfolio was collectively managed by an organization called VIA Licensing Alliance. Such an arrangement—bundling the rights of multiple patent holders under a single licensing window—is known as a patent pool. It saves implementers the trouble of negotiating individually with each rights holder, in exchange for paying royalties to the pool as a whole. However, VIA Licensing Alliance was merely the administering body, not the actual rights holder of the individual patents. The holder of the last patent to expire this time was Siemens AG, so the notion that "VIA Licensing Alliance's patent expired" isn't quite accurate.
Why Did One Brazilian Patent Outlive All the Others by a Decade?
This patent was granted on July 19, 2016, and expired ten years later, on July 19, 2026. Patent terms are typically calculated as 20 years from the filing date. However, Brazilian patent law contains a special provision guaranteeing a minimum exclusivity period of 10 years from the grant date, and this patent fell under that provision. For cases where more than 15 years elapsed between filing and grant, the 10-year guarantee from the grant date extends further than the 20-year term from the filing date, meaning the special provision effectively determines the actual expiration date. For example, if a case took 18 years from filing to grant, the filing-date-based calculation would leave only 2 years of exclusivity remaining—but the grant-date-based 10-year guarantee adds an effective 8 additional years of patent term.
The purpose of this provision is to prevent applicants from losing substantial exclusivity due to examination delays. Under a system that only guarantees 20 years from filing, a case that took 15 years to examine would leave only 5 years of exclusivity. The provision guaranteeing a minimum 10 years from the grant date is designed to ensure such examination delays don't disadvantage applicants—but as a side effect, cases with longer examination periods end up with expiration dates pushed further into the future.
Indeed, according to reports, the corresponding European patents (Germany, France, UK) expired on April 9, 2021, while the U.S. patent family expired in stages: January 2018, March 2022, and November 14, 2023 (the last of these held by Dolby). In other words, in all major markets outside Brazil, every MPEG-4 Part 2 patent had disappeared by the end of 2023 at the latest. For the following two years and eight months, this single Brazilian patent alone survived in the gap left by the system.
While other major countries reached their expiration dates methodically based on filing date, only Brazil had a rule that converted delays in the grant process directly into extended patent life. As a result, a single patent delayed the world's transition to a patent-free standard by more than two years. Existing reports arguing that the practical impact is minimal fail to touch on this institutional background.
From MP3 (2017) to MPEG-4 (2026) to H.264 (Projected 2027): A Lineage
The European patents for the audio compression standard MP3 expired in 2012, but the U.S. rights persisted for a while longer; the rights holders, Fraunhofer IIS and Technicolor, formally ended their licensing program on April 23, 2017. By that point, MP3 had already ceded its leading role to formats like AAC, so the move to make it free was, in a sense, a mere formality after the fact—but it did further accelerate adoption in embedded devices and open-source software.
There's a nine-year gap between the end of MP3 licensing (2017) and the full expiration of MPEG-4 Part 2 (2026). What both cases share is a sequence in which the patents expire long after the standard has already stepped down from mainstream use. MP3 also operated under a joint licensing arrangement with multiple rights holders, similar to MPEG-4 Part 2, and both followed the same path: the codec only became truly royalty-free in name and substance after its administering body dissolved. Lining up MP3 (2017), MPEG-4 Part 2 (2026), and H.264 (projected 2027), it appears that major codec patents settle into freedom roughly once a decade, in sequence.
There are estimates suggesting that the primary U.S. patents for H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) will expire around November 29, 2027. If this timing holds, it would come roughly one year and four months after MPEG-4 Part 2's complete expiration in July 2026. Note that only Part 2 expired this time; Part 10, which includes H.264, is a separate standard, and its rights remain fully valid.
Limited Practical Impact, Yet Meaningful for Japanese Developers
The practical impact of this expiration on already-implemented software is limited. Major open-source media tools like VLC and FFmpeg have long supported MPEG-4 Part 2 regardless of patent status. There's no improvement in image quality or speed to speak of. The code implementation itself has remained largely unchanged for over a decade; what changes this time is purely the licensing status.
Formally, there is no longer any entity to demand royalties, nor any litigation risk. Even though the situation was never technically illegal, the lingering possibility that a rights holder might demand royalties has cast a shadow over development decisions all along. This kind of legal risk has been a factor in whether to include the codec in standard repositories or relegate it to optional installation. A patent remaining alive in just one country was also an awkward complication for software distributed globally, making it difficult to judge "how far is truly safe." The fact that this single Brazilian patent lingered until the very end only made that judgment harder.
The beneficiaries here are the open-source side—FFmpeg, GStreamer, VLC, Xvid—and embedded device manufacturers. For those who had avoided implementing MPEG-4 Part 2 due to licensing costs or legal risk concerns, that rationale formally disappears. For embedded device manufacturers, adding decoding functionality to new model numbers now involves one fewer procedural step: no more royalty calculations or license clause verification.
On the other hand, VIA Licensing Alliance stands to lose, as it loses the basis for its administrative fee income. That said, since the original licensors had already lost their revenue streams in major markets years earlier, the actual financial blow from this event is likely minor. None of the reports referenced here touch on how much royalty income this pool actually collected, or the extent of collection and litigation activity within Brazil itself.
According to reports, more than 30 companies were listed as members of this licensing pool, including Canon, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba. If accurate, this would mean several Japanese companies were among them—though this figure comes from a single source alone. DivX and Xvid were also the codecs that underpinned DVD ripping and video sharing in Japan during the 2000s, so the disappearance of their final patent marks a milestone of sorts for domestic developers and users who remember that era.
What kept MPEG-4 Part 2 alive until the very end wasn't technology—it was a calculation formula rooted in the grant date, etched into the patent law of a single country: Brazil. The next deadline on the horizon belongs to H.264, with estimates suggesting the primary U.S. patents will expire around November 2027.