July 19, 2026
Patent funeral, party like it’s 2002
The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired
The final legal roadblock is gone, and the internet is ready to party like it’s 2002
TLDR: The last patent covering an old but widely used video format expired today, removing the final legal holdout in Brazil. Commenters celebrated the freedom for open-source tools, joked about returning to the DivX torrent era, and argued over which ancient video format was actually being freed.
A tiny legal footnote in Brazil just triggered a surprisingly loud victory lap online: the last remaining patent tied to MPEG-4 Visual — an old video format family behind things like DivX and XviD — has finally expired. In plain English, one of the last big legal “don’t touch that” signs hanging over this aging video tech has come down. And the community reaction? Equal parts celebration, nostalgia, and nerdy bickering.
The happiest crowd sees this as a win for open-source software, with one commenter cheering, “Very nice,” and hoping free projects will now support it more openly. Another admitted they were interested in building encoding tools but were too nervous to dive in before. That’s the upbeat side: freedom, experimentation, and fewer legal headaches.
But of course, the comments couldn’t just behave. One of the funniest reactions immediately turned the moment into a time machine joke: let’s “encode video and torrent like it’s 2002!” That line basically became the mood of the thread — dusty hard drives, sketchy downloads, and the glorious chaos of early internet movie culture. Then came the classic comment-section drama: wait, which MPEG thing is this again? One user had to step in and correct the record, reminding everyone this is the old DivX/XviD world, not the newer H.264 format. Another added a reality check that cheap DVD players had been handling XviD for years anyway, just with limitations. So yes, the law changed today — but in the comments, the real battle was over whether this is a historic liberation or just the internet rediscovering its 2000s junk drawer.
Key Points
- •The last remaining patent tied to MPEG-4 Part 2 expired on 19 July 2026.
- •US and EU patents related to MPEG-4 Part 2 had already expired in prior years.
- •The final active patent was located in Brazil.
- •That patent was BRPI0109962B1, titled "process for storing and processing image information from successive images over time."
- •VIA Licensing Alliance confirmed that BRPI0109962B1 was the final MPEG-4 Visual patent and that it expired on 19 July 2026.