Not With a Bang, But a Whimper
Sun, 19 Jul 2026
Somewhere in São Paulo in 2001, a patent examiner approved Brazilian filing BR PI0109962-0, assigned to Siemens AG, covering some sliver of what would become the MPEG-4 Visual standard. Today, twenty-five years later, that patent's term has run out. And with it - quietly, without a press release, without so much as a blog post from the people collecting the checks - the last known living patent in the MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio expired.
Via Licensing Alliance, the patent pool administrator formerly known as MPEG LA, publishes a running attachment listing every "Expired Patent" in each of its programs, updated periodically as a courtesy to licensees who no longer owe them money. The July 1, 2026, revision of the MPEG-4 Visual attachment runs pages of dead patents, stretching back to expirations in the 2000s, followed by exactly one entry that, as of publication, hadn't expired yet: Siemens AG, BR PI0109962-0, expiring July 19, 2026.
That's today.
Go looking for the MPEG-4 Visual program on Via's own site now, and the listing that used to route to /licensing-programs/mpeg-4-visual/ returns a 404. No obituary. No, "thank you for two decades of royalties." Just a quietly pruned link on a page that still lists everything else. It went out not with a bang, but with a whimper.
I want to sit with that whimper for a second, because I think it's the whole story.
For a quarter of a century, MPEG-4 Visual (also called MPEG-4 Part 2 - the codec behind DivX, Xvid, 3ivx, and a decade's worth of camcorders, mobile phones, and more) sat behind a toll booth. If you wanted to write software that encoded or decoded that format, a pool of roughly two dozen companies believed you owed them money, because somewhere in their combined patent portfolios was a claim on some part of how the format worked. It didn't matter that you wrote every line of code yourself. It didn't matter that you'd never heard of Panasonic's macroblock prediction patent.
That's the part that gets lost when people talk about software patents in the abstract: the harm isn't just the lawsuits that get filed. It's the projects that never get written, the features quietly left out, the maintainer who spends more time reading legal FAQs than writing code, because the possibility of a claim is enough to chill the work.
Writing and sharing software that reads a file format shouldn't require a lawyer on retainer. For MPEG-4 Visual, it did for two and a half decades.
What's interesting - and what I think is actually the useful lesson here - is why this pool actually ran dry, when so many others don't seem to. AVC/H.264 and HEVC/VVC are still very much open for business over at Via. The difference is that MPEG-4 Visual was a closed, frozen target: the contributing patents were all filed against a standard that stopped evolving decades ago, so no new patents entered the pool to replace those expiring. AVC and HEVC, by contrast, are "evergreen" - new implementation patents get filed and folded in continuously. Hence, the pool's expiration date keeps receding into the future no matter how long you wait. MPEG-4 Visual didn't run out because anyone showed mercy. It ran out because it was old enough and abandoned enough that the well of new patents to add to it finally went dry, too. That's not a design feature anyone should count on. It's a fluke of a codec nobody bothered to keep patenting.
The real fix, of course, isn't waiting decades for patents to expire. It's a two-pronged strategy to eliminate software patents in the first place and to build new things - such as AV1 and its successors - royalty-free from the start, the way the Alliance for Open Media set out to do. Patent expiration is a floor, not a strategy. But floors matter too. Today, one more closed.