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Where inventions become free
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 — then we rebuild the best of the expired ones as working simulations you can play with no license required. This is the graveyard and the resurrection, in one place.
Next death on the clock
Verified against USPTO-adjusted expiration data — live, client-side, flips automatically at the moment of expiry.
US7747520 — Method and system for monitoring for and reporting of lien distress events
First American CoreLogic, Inc. · USPTO-adjusted expiry 2026-08-04
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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.