A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

Multimedia playback has always been awkward on Linux, and not only for technical reasons. Distributing proprietary software and patent-encumbered codecs raises legal questions that companies like Microsoft can settle by buying a licence and baking the technology into their products — an option that is far less feasible for distributions designed to be downloaded and redistributed freely. Developers have used workarounds for decades; anyone who installed a Linux distribution and then spent time enabling third-party repositories for codecs has already met that boundary.

According to XDA, one of the patents behind that boundary has now expired. Simon Batt, writing for the site, reports that a Brazilian patent from 2001 prevented DivX video from being patent-free worldwide — until it lapsed this summer.

Siemens's patent from 2001

On 9 April 2001, Siemens AG filed Brazilian patent BR PI0109962-0, titled "process for storing and processing image information from successive images over time." The patent belonged to the MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio, administered by MPEG LA, which later became Via Licensing Alliance. In an MPEG LA document from October 2025, the final two unexpired patents appear on the first page: Dolby's BR PI0113271-7, which expired on 26 January 2026, and the Siemens patent. On 19 July 2026 the Siemens patent expired as well, removing the last obstacle to worldwide patent-free status for that technology.

A minor headache, now gone

Xvid, the video codec software, is a peculiar case: the code is free and open source, but laws governed what could be done with it, and rights holders asked for royalties on MPEG-4 decoders and encoders sold or made in specific countries. The Linux community never hit a brick wall — Fedora published xvidcore back in 2023, while the patent was still alive — but the expiration means the technology can now be distributed without that particular legal concern.

What does not change

The patent covered MPEG-4 Part 2, not the modern standard: video watched on today's systems using H.264/AVC runs on MPEG-4 Part 10, which remains covered by patents. So the MP4 format is not about to become patent-free, and Linux distributions are not at liberty to ship it wherever they please.

Batt's conclusion is measured: little will change for Linux users or for MP4 patent law, and most people outside Brazil will notice nothing. The milestone matters mainly as an illustration — how a single patent filed a quarter of a century ago can still act as a headache for open-source software twenty-five years later.