Standards: Appendix J - MPEG-4 Licensing & Patents
Here is a list which shows whether each of the 34 parts of the MPEG-4 standard is encumbered with a patent.
This is an Appendix to our series of articles on Standards.
Read carefully where a standard describes whether patents apply to its use. It is usually very near the front. The authors may not have known which patents apply when the standard was drafted and the descriptions may be incomplete. It is worth the time and effort to research this before committing to the use of a standard to avoid license fees later on.
Details of the patents known to ISO are described in a downloadable spreadsheet but there may be other patents that they do not know about until the owner declares their interest in the standards:
http://www.iso.org/patents
This list of MPEG-4 parts indicates whether they are encumbered by patents:
| Part | Content | Patents |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Systems | Yes |
| 2 | Visual | Yes |
| 3 | Audio | Yes |
| 4 | Conformance testing | Yes |
| 5 | Reference software | Yes |
| 6 | DMIF | Yes |
| 7 | Reference software for A/V objects | No |
| 8 | Carriage over IP | No |
| 9 | Reference hardware | No |
| 10 | AVC | Yes |
| 11 | BIFS (Scene description) | Yes |
| 12 | ISO Base Media File Format | Yes |
| 13 | IPMP | No |
| 14 | MP4 file format | Yes |
| 15 | Carriage of NAL format video | Yes |
| 16 | AFX - Animation Framework | Yes |
| 17 | Streaming Text Format | No |
| 18 | Font compression and streaming | Yes |
| 19 | Synthesised texture stream | Yes |
| 20 | LASeR (Lightweight scene description) | Yes |
| 21 | MPEG-J extension for rendering | No |
| 22 | Open Font Format (OFF) | Yes |
| 23 | Symbolic Music Representation (SMR) | No |
| 24 | Audio and systems interaction | No |
| 25 | 3D-Graphics compression model | Yes |
| 26 | Audio conformance testing | No |
| 27 | 3D-Graphics conformance testing | Yes |
| 28 | Composite font representation | No |
| 29 | Web Video Coding (WVC) | Yes |
| 30 | Timed text and other visual overlays in ISOBMFF | No |
| 31 | Video coding for browsers | Yes |
| 32 | File format reference software and conformance | No |
| 33 | Internet Video Coding (IVC) | Yes |
| 34 | Bitstream Syntactic Description Language (SDL) | No |
The list will evolve because patents don't last forever (typically 20 years) and submarine patents do not surface right away. Almost all of the patents that encumber MPEG-4 Part 2 (Visual) have expired. The patents on AVC will take a little longer but will all have expired by 2030. HEVC will take longer still but eventually will be patent free.
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