The last MPEG-4 patent just expired, and it took until 2026 because of Brazil
MPEG-4 Part 2 patents had already lapsed in the US and EU. One patent held in Brazil kept the codec technically encumbered everywhere else until July 19, 2026.
A single Brazilian patent kept MPEG-4 encumbered worldwide for years. It just expired.
The final active MPEG-4 Part 2 patent expired on July 19, 2026. Patent BRPI0109962B1, covering a process for storing and processing successive image information, was held in Brazil, the last jurisdiction where MPEG-4 Part 2 patents remained enforceable after they had already lapsed in the US and EU.
Why one country held up the whole codec
Patent terms and filings vary by jurisdiction, and the VIA Licensing Alliance managed the broader MPEG-4 Visual patent portfolio across them. Once the US and EU patents expired, MPEG-4 Part 2 was royalty-free in most of the world in practice, but not in principle: a single active patent anywhere is still a real legal exposure for anyone shipping the codec globally, which kept it technically encumbered until this specific filing lapsed.
What changes now
Nothing changes in terms of what the codec can technically do. What changes is the licensing risk: developers and codec implementers can now use MPEG-4 Part 2 without royalty obligations or licensing restrictions in any jurisdiction, not just the ones where the patents already ran out. Given how widely MPEG-4 still shows up in multimedia software and hardware, this closes out a long tail of legal exposure for anyone shipping it.
Why a build studio cares
Codec licensing is exactly the kind of legal detail that gets skipped during a build and shows up later as a real liability, especially for anything doing video encoding, transcoding, or playback. This is a small, concrete example of that risk actually resolving instead of quietly persisting, worth knowing about if MPEG-4 shows up anywhere in a client's stack.
Next step: read Phoronix's coverage for the patent details. If codec licensing is a live question for a build you're shipping, write to us at hello@gattyworks.com.