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Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

patentsexpiringtoday.com

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Re: Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

#81

Post by iplaw »

wetherbeei wrote: post #72
niko001 wrote: post #2

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 inspired by existing inventions. The site uses the recently released USPTO-API [2] to fetch newly expired patents each day. NB: The reason the most recent patents displayed are from 12/31 is because no new patents were granted during the first few days of January 199…

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 , 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…

You run Google Patents? Where is the comment jar?

Re: Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

#82

Post by ww520 »

wetherbeei wrote: post #72
niko001 wrote: post #2

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 inspired by existing inventions. The site uses the recently released USPTO-API [2] to fetch newly expired patents each day. NB: The reason the most recent patents displayed are from 12/31 is because no new patents were granted during the first few days of January 199…

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 , 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…

Thank you for the great work. It's very useful.

Re: Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

#83

Post by ww520 »

fizixer wrote: post #62
niko001 wrote: post #2

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 inspired by existing inventions. The site uses the recently released USPTO-API [2] to fetch newly expired patents each day. NB: The reason the most recent patents displayed are from 12/31 is because no new patents were granted during the first few days of January 199…

- 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?)

Prior art.

Re: Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

#84

Post by blackflame7000 »

wetherbeei wrote: post #72
niko001 wrote: post #2

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 inspired by existing inventions. The site uses the recently released USPTO-API [2] to fetch newly expired patents each day. NB: The reason the most recent patents displayed are from 12/31 is because no new patents were granted during the first few days of January 199…

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 , 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…

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

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.

Re: Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

#85

Post by takingflac »

a1a wrote: post #76
blizkreeg wrote: post #75

Does anyone think there are viable/profitable business ideas in there? If the original inventors didn't bother to build something out of it, I wonder if it's because the patents themselves are "good thought experiments" or if the inventors lacked the business wherewithal to make it happen.

Most definitely. In my experience ideas are rarely valuable by themselves. Rather an idea is valuable when implemented by someone who have what it takes to see it through. Simply put, not a lot of people have what it takes just because they filed a patent.

At least the ideas are put on record and able to be accessed by someone who could see it through once the patent has expired, which fortunately is a reasonable amount of time.

Re: Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

#86

Post by panabee »

wetherbeei wrote: post #72
niko001 wrote: post #2

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 inspired by existing inventions. The site uses the recently released USPTO-API [2] to fetch newly expired patents each day. NB: The reason the most recent patents displayed are from 12/31 is because no new patents were granted during the first few days of January 199…

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 , 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…

thanks for the great work and insightful comments! what are the top three things you would do if you could reform the patent system? and do you support/oppose abolishing patents for software (or any other kinds of products)?

Re: Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

#88

Post by pbhjpbhj »

wetherbeei wrote: post #72
niko001 wrote: post #2

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 inspired by existing inventions. The site uses the recently released USPTO-API [2] to fetch newly expired patents each day. NB: The reason the most recent patents displayed are from 12/31 is because no new patents were granted during the first few days of January 199…

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 , 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…

>Google Patents focuses on improving patent quality. //

Could you go in to that a bit. There's been fulltext, full image databases with proximity searching and bespoke classifications and such for a while, how has Google Patents improved on that. How is it better than Espacenet for example?

When I looked at patents a lot the biggest help would probably have been being able to get decent translations of Korean/Japanese/Chinese/etc. patents - I gather you were involved in an EPO project to do that. What other goodies have I missed?

>but while building your copy of A + B you might come to the same conclusion //

Worth noting is that this is fine in most jurisdictions as long as your not trying to commercialise the build.

Re: Show HN: Explore ideas whose patent protection expires today

#90

Post by jandrese »

logicallee wrote: post #30
jandrese wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the patent system is to make sure ideas aren't locked up so we can advance as a society (something the Copyright office has forgotten), so once they expire they are in the Public Domain forever.

This is not the only point of the patent system: you seem to think that any good patents could have been kept as trade secrets. But that's not the case. Sometimes there would be no way to use a patent as a trade secret, because, for example, it's simply given to the consumer and they can see how it works, easily. So another important point is to allow people to research and innovate and make it to market under a stat…

No the whole point is to avoid this trade secret nonsense. Get the good ideas out into the public sphere and yet still reward the people who came up with them by giving them a limited window to monetize the ideas. Once the window is up everybody else is free to improve upon the ideas freely, avoiding licensing hell and also making sure inventors that get lucky can't just sit on their thumbs for the rest of their lives milking their one good idea. Or in the case of Copyrights, letting their great great grandchildren sit on their butts and milk the invention.

Excessive use of trade secrets leads you down the road of middle age trade guilds that had to jealously guard their skills and could spend more energy keeping their secrets than advancing their arts.

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