The MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio License has been in effect since January 1, 2000, covering essential patents behind the MPEG-4 Part 2 Visual standard from more than 30 licensors, including Canon, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba.
As of July 19, 2026, every one of those patents has expired. The very last one standing belonged to Siemens AG, active only in Brazil. VIA Licensing Alliance, the body that administers the portfolio, has already taken down the webpage for it, which was around until July 18, a day before the expiry.
The patent in question is BR PI0109962-0, titled "process for storing and processing image information from successive images over time."
How we got here
Siemens had filed the same patent across several jurisdictions, and most of those expired years ago.
The European version, EP 1,279,291, expired on April 9, 2021, across Germany, France, and the UK. Two other Siemens US patents in the broader portfolio, US 6,636,637 and US 7,068,721, expired in January 2018 and March 2022, respectively.
The rest of the portfolio wound down on a similar timeline. Koninklijke Philips N.V.'s US 6,959,046, expired on December 7, 2022; Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation's US 7,395,211, expired on November 14, 2023, making it the last US patent in the pool to expire.
That left Brazil's BR PI0109962-0 as the final one.
What does this mean?
With the last patent gone, this specific license no longer has any patents behind it. VIA Licensing Alliance's per-unit royalties on decoders and encoders, along with its separate participation fees for subscription and title-by-title video services, have nothing left to enforce.
That doesn't mean every possible MPEG-4 Visual patent anywhere is gone, just the ones in this specific pool. Other essential patents could exist outside it. But for the 30-plus companies that did join, the licensing obligation is now over.
A quick look at MPEG-4 Visual
MPEG-4 Visual is formally Part 2 of the MPEG-4 suite of standards, the same family that gave us the MP4 container format as Part 14.
The container and the codec are separate things. MP4 files can hold audio and video encoded in several different codecs, including MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264/AVC, HEVC, and AV1.
The standard itself was developed by MPEG, the Moving Picture Experts Group, a working group under ISO/IEC responsible for compression standards spanning video, audio, and 3D graphics.
MPEG doesn't administer the patents behind its own standards, though. That job fell to VIA Licensing Alliance, formerly MPEG LA, which pooled patents from Canon, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba, and more than 30 other licensors into a single license.
Over the years, companies large and small took out licenses to use MPEG-4 Visual in their products. Canonical, Apple, Sony, Raspberry Pi, and The Walt Disney Company all appear on VIA Licensing Alliance's list of licensees in good standing, alongside hundreds of others spanning security cameras, media players, and broadcast equipment.
Electronic Engineering Times has a detailed writeup on the history of MPEG licensing if you are looking for a longer read.
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