5 ms·

The majority [1] of patents are never commercially exploited or licensed - I wanted a way to browse recently expired patents to find hidden gems and get inspire

• joe_fro 10y ago
  Great work with this, I can see it providing me hours of entertainment. Obligatory what's the stack?
  • niko001 10y ago
    Thanks, I'm glad you like it :) I've kept it really simple - the patentsview.org API spits out JSON, which I'm feeding into the (awesome!) DataTables jQuery-plugin. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages. I'm planning a HN-style voting system so that interesting patents trickle to the top.
    • joe_fro 10y ago
      Are you planning on having a feature to pick a range of days, so that I can seen what expired over the last week?
    • logicallee 10y ago
      2017, when "really simple" is a jQuery plugin. ;)
      • eriknstr 10y ago
        Simple from a development point of view.
      • halomru 10y ago
        After all, right now the perceived norm is to send all your 100Mb/day of data through a kafkaesk array of message queues, stream processors and map-reduce jobs.
        • nathancahill 10y ago
          Gotta have that sweet sweet Big Data.
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I just had a cow-orker ask me if I know any Angular, because he wants to display a single value in browser from a sensor attached to Raspberry Pi. So yes, jQuery plugin is pretty damn simple for 2017.
    • gr3yh47 10y ago
      datatables is fantastic, almost always a better solution than native html tables for any non-trivial information display
• activatedgeek 10y ago
  This is amazing work! I wonder if you've been actively using patents as your source of ideas? It seems like an unnatural path to go down, looking for ideas.
• agumonkey 10y ago
  Doing god's work.
• fizixer 10y ago
  - So no one can re-patent the expired patents? - If you build and sell a product based on one of these, you don't have to worry about getting sued? (but at the same time you have no protection against cheap clones of your product either?)
  • ReedJessen 10y ago
    "So no one can re-patent the expired patents?" Correct. To get a new patent, your invention by novel and unobvious. If it has been patented before, it will not be novel when attempting to "re-patent" it. Therefore, re-patenting is not possible.
    • mcherm 10y ago
      Furthermore, lots of things are considered "not novel" or "obvious" by nearly every expert in the field, but not by patent examiners. But one specific area which patent examiners are VERY good at reviewing is old patents. So re-patenting old patented inventions becomes impossible, not only in theory but in practice also.
      • ska 10y ago
        It's not that they are very good at it - it's that this is typically all they are going to be looking at. They're also better (and have better tools) at searching patent databases than nearly anyone who doesn't do this daily.
        • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
          >this is typically all they are going to be looking at. // Are you referring to the USPTO there, do you have a source?
          • ska 10y ago
            Just going by what several specialists (e.g. patent agents, ex examiners) have told me independently. It does match my experience in office actions with many different examiners, for whatever that's worth.
• wetherbeei 10y ago
  I run Google Patents (patents.google.com) - we've thought about including a way to search by expired patents (we have the expiration indicators), but in my opinion it gives a false sense of security. There's also http://freeip.mtu.edu/home/index.php http://freeip.mtu.edu/home/index.php, which searches over only expired patents. The patent in question could have been improved upon, and that improvement can still be in force. Say someone patents a widget A + B, and later files a continuation A + B + C (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application). The first patent could be expired, but while building your copy of A + B you might come to the same conclusion that the invention also needs to include C (which is still in force) to actually work. Google Patents focuses on improving patent quality. There's still uncertainty if a granted patent is actually valid. If we can improve the prior art finding process for inventors and examiners, then fewer overly-broad patents will be granted, and it will be easier to tell if an invention actually infringes a patent. Then we can start to think about making patent information more useful for part of the original purpose - as a transfer of knowledge to the public domain in exchange for a temporary exclusive right.
  • iplaw 10y ago
    You run Google Patents? Where is the comment jar?
    • amelius 10y ago
      Yes, it would be great if patents could have user comments associated with them. (The same can be said for publications in google scholar, perhaps you could pass it on to the appropriate team)
  • ww520 10y ago
    Thank you for the great work. It's very useful.
  • blackflame7000 10y ago
    Great insight on continuing patent applications. I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment that overly broad patents, particularly with respect to technology, need serious review. It is way too easy to patent a concept instead of an invention. An example to illustrate my point is a patent such as this: http://www.google.com/patents/US20140244001 http://www.google.com/patents/US20140244001 Which basically says, I haven't actually invented anything useful, but if anyone else does they should have to pay me because I thought of something super generic first.
• gist 10y ago
  This would be even more helpful if you could do X days in advance of expiration rather than day of expiration.
• agumonkey 10y ago
  I posted your site on reddit, someone is complaining that many patents are renewed and potentially not listed on your site. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5lta71/patentsexpiringtodaycom_find_patents_that_expired/dbycphk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5lta71/patentse... If you can do something about it it's cool otherwise well, still not bad.