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You can take a look at http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.asp...

It mentions which ones are expired, but it doesn't say how much longer the remaining ones will be valid.

Someone ran a script to extract the patent numbers from that list and put together a table of application/grant/expiration dates: http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_pat...

Looks like the last one expires in 2027.

So 15 more years, basically. Man, that's depressing. What's fast becoming the standard for HTML5 video has 15 more years of not being truly free. I wonder what mozilla will do about that.

The problem is, with these perpetual upgrades (which undoubtedly will be patented from the the present time) they want to stretch it well beyond 15 years. Luckily H.264 is not a standard in any way, since W3C removed any specific codecs from the video/audio tag spec.

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