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Days
Where inventions become free
Trading patents, counted down to expiry — and the dead ones rebuilt as playable demos.
Watch a patent's term run out to the second, or open a resurrection and use the mechanism yourself — no license required.
See the 23 dying now → Play a resurrection →
Patents are compressed R&D. When they die, the mechanism belongs to everyone. We track a corpus of 13,862 trading patents to the day their term runs out, and rebuild the best of the expired ones as working simulations.
Next death on the clock
US7644031 — System and method for replenishing quantities of trading orders
BGC Partners, Inc. · USPTO-adjusted expiry 2026-10-21
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Verified against USPTO-adjusted expiration data — live, client-side, flips automatically at the moment of expiry.
Featured graves
Expired patents, rebuilt as playable demos — the mechanism, resurrected.
Resurrected
Wagner Matching Engine
US4903201 · expired 2007-02-20
An automated futures-matching exchange, filed in November 1983 — one of the earliest attempts to put a human trading pit inside a computer.
Resurrected
News-Sentiment Trading Signal Backtester
US8285619 · expired 2024-11-11
Filed in 2002, before 'NLP' meant much more than keyword rules and bag-of-words models. Its owner let it lapse for unpaid fees around 2024 — years before its adjusted term would have ended, and right as LLMs made news-sentiment trading mainstream.
Resurrected
Virtual Specialist AMM
US5950176 · expired 2016-03-25
A software 'specialist' that always quotes a two-sided market and takes the other side of every trade — the automated-market-maker idea, patented in 1996, years before AMMs became the backbone of on-chain trading.
Featured stories
What patents reveal about the businesses and technologies that filed them.
Story
US11170444
The New York Stock Exchange itself filed a trade-quality-indication patent in 2021 — and let it lapse for nonpayment four years later, with fifteen years of possible term still ahead of it.
Story
US8285619
An NLP-for-market-prediction patent from the bag-of-words era, filed in 2002 by a group of notable language-processing researchers. Its owner let it lapse for unpaid fees around 2024 — years before its adjusted term would have ended, and right as large language models made 'read the news, trade the sentiment' mainstream.
Story
US3946218
The oldest grave in the corpus: a Hewlett-Packard calculator patent from 1974, for a machine that could compute a bond's yield to maturity at the push of a button — a genuinely novel thing to put in someone's hands, fifty years ago.
The 23 dying now
Active trading patents counting down live to verified, USPTO-adjusted expiration dates.
R.I.P.
Method and system for monitoring for and reporting of lien distress ev…
US7747520
First American CoreLogic, Inc.
adjusted expiry 2026-08-04
R.I.P.
Method and system for using credit lines to enhance the durability of …
US8055566
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adjusted expiry 2026-08-20
R.I.P.
System and method for replenishing quantities of trading orders
US7644031
BGC Partners, Inc.
adjusted expiry 2026-10-21
R.I.P.
Method and system for updating a loan portfolio with information on se…
US7809635
CoreLogic Solutions, LLC
adjusted expiry 2026-11-15
The gaming wing
Patents behind the mechanics you've played — some dead, some dying, some still very much alive.
Active
US10926179
The system that remembers the orc who killed you and gives him a scar — still under an active US patent for roughly another decade.
Active (dying)
US7402104B2 (estimated)
The countdown lives at /dying/us7402104b2. This page is where the resurrection unlocks once it flips.
Expired
The already-free arsenal
Three mechanics that used to carry a license shadow and don't anymore: the floating direction arrow, the playable loading screen, and a game that lies to you about its own state.
Frequently asked questions
What is Patent Graveyard?
A live countdown to when US trading patents expire, plus playable resurrections of the best expired ones. It's built on a corpus of 13,862 patents from the USPTO Open Data Portal (CPC classes G06Q 40/04 and 40/06).
Are the expiry dates legal advice?
No. They're estimates computed from public filing data (see the methodology), and they ignore patent-term adjustments, extensions, and terminal disclaimers. Confirm against USPTO records before relying on any date.
Can I use an expired patent?
Once a patent's term ends, the invention it claimed generally enters the public domain and can be built without a license. Other rights may still apply to a specific product; this is general information, not legal advice.