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Have the patents for H.264 MPEG-4 AVC expired yet?

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NO! ☹️ (in Brazil, China, Europe, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the United States)
YES! 😍 (elsewhere)

This article only considers H.264 Version 3 / High Profiles, which are the most common used profiles. These profiles were standardized in 2005-03-01, so only patents with a priority before this date are reported here, unless otherwise noted.

Most patents already expired, but some are still active somewhere:

For historical reference:

  • last patent in Canada, CA 2525937, expired on 2024-03-30.

The patent list managed by Via Licensing Alliance is available at: https://www.via-la.com/licensing-2/avc-h-264/avc-h-264-patent-list/

Expiration dates are according to "Google Patents" and may not always be correct. For example for US 7826532 patent Google reports an expiration date of 2027-11-29, while Via Licensing Alliance reports it as expired in 2023-09-04.

A cat surrounded by coins
I haz horded all the monies
no patent monies 4 u

See also on Wikipedia: MPEG LA, AVC Licensing

This is about H.264 or AVC. For MPEG-4 Part 2 (for example Xvid) see Have the patents for MPEG-4 Visual expired yet?

This is not legal advice. Here's a legal advice: call your lawyer.

Patents for SVC profiles

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These patents have a priority before 2005-03-01 (specification release date of Version 3 / High Profiles) but are needed only for Version 8 / Scalable Video Coding (SVC) profiles:

European patents

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Note that possibly last active EU patents for H.264 Version 1, containing Baseline, Main, and Extended profiles were EP 1611747, EP 1791369 and EP 2209319 which all expired on 2024-03-26.

US patents

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Patents added to MPEG LA patent list before 2012

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These patents were in the patent list before 2012 (according to https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_patents) and all have a priority before 2005-03-01 (specification release date of Version 3 / High Profiles). It is unknown which of them are actually needed for the Version 3 / High Profiles:

Patents added to MPEG LA patent list since 2012

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These patents were added in the patent list after 2012 (according to https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_patents) and all have a priority before 2005-03-01 (specification release date of Version 3 / High Profiles). Someone should figure if they are essential for Version 3 / High Profiles or just needed for later H.264 Versions:

US Patents owned by Nokia

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Nokia sued HP and Amazon in October 2023 in multiple countries such as USA, UK and more for violating H.264/H.265 patents[1][2][3]. Here is a list of the US patents in their lawsuits and their expiration dates (it is not clear if these patents are all needed for H.264, or if they are needed for H.265 or something else):

Options

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OpenH264 binaries from Cisco can be used free of charge.

Version 1 of H.264 (containing Baseline, Main, and Extended profiles) may have all patents already expired in some country (for example in Europe), you could consider using it.

Use other royalty-free codecs, like AV1, VP9, VP8, Theora.

Use codecs with expired patents, like MPEG-4 Part 2.

  1. ↑ "nokia blog". 
  2. ↑ "nokia vs hp court document". 
  3. ↑ "nokia vs amazon court document". 
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