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Our story begins back on April 9th, 2001, when Siemens AG filed the Brazilian patent BR PI0109962-0, titled "process for storing and processing image information from successive images over time." This patent was listed as part of the MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio, which was administered by MPEG LA, which would later become the Via Licensing Alliance.
For years, these patents held true. In fact, in an MPEG LA PDF document from October 2025, you can see the final two unexpired patents on the very first page. The first is Dolby, which held patent BR PI0113271-7; this one expired on January 26, 2026. For the rest of 2026, the only thing stopping the tech from being patent-free worldwide was that one Siemens AG patent.
Finally, on July 19, 2026, the Siemens AG patent expired. With that patent gone, it removed the final patent obstacle preventing worldwide patent-free status.
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25 years of one patent keeping a decoder from shipping is a decent reminder that a lot of this stuff's just rent on everyone else's code. nobody got generous, the clock just ran out
Worth noting the real-world lag: patents may expire, but licensing bodies and codec vendors typically wait for the formal portfolio closure announcement before shipping free implementations. Companies that already signed MPEG-LA licenses also have existing contracts they'll honor until renewal. So the practical 'free to use' date for Brazil trails the legal expiry by months — keep an eye on Via LA's public portfolio status page.
This matters because MPEG-4 Visual (Part 2) is still the decoder behind many legacy AVI/MP4 files, and patent expiry is why modern browsers can ship H.264/AVC and AV1 freely. The last Dolby BR patent expiring Jan 2026 and this Siemens one expiring now means the full MPEG-4 Visual portfolio is effectively free to implement in Brazil — relevant for any project that avoided MPEG-LA licenses for the Brazilian market. Worth checking if Via LA has formally closed the portfolio.
The practical effect: any Brazilian project building MPEG-4 Part 2 decoders no longer needs a Via LA license for the core Visual portfolio. Combined with the Dolby expiry in January, the whole stack is now free in BR. For the rest of the world most of this was already unencumbered or licensed via different pools, but Brazil was one of the last holdouts.