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Dying · US8301675
Computer system for predicting the evolution of a chronological set of numerical values
The death that didn't happen. A system for forecasting a chronological series of numbers — general enough to brush up against a lot of modern algorithmic forecasting — and the patent that taught this site, publicly, why naive patent-term math isn't enough.
Correction (July 12, 2026): at launch this site counted this patent down to July 7, 2026, and briefly displayed it as having entered the public domain on that date. That was wrong. Patent-term adjustment moves its USPTO-listed expiration to March 2, 2029, and the patent is active — its 12th-year maintenance fee was paid in December 2023. The claimed mechanism is NOT free to build until the adjusted term actually ends.
Assignee: — · Filed 2006-07-07 (PCT) / 2008-01-11 (US national stage) · Granted 2012-10-30 · Adjusted expiry 2029-03-02
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Dates on the curated countdown pages are USPTO-adjusted expiration dates (verified against USPTO/Google Patents legal-status data as of July 2026, including patent-term adjustment); they still assume maintenance fees keep being paid, and are not a legal determination. Dates in the searchable database are raw patent-term math (20 years from filing, or the older 17-from-grant rule) that ignores adjustments, extensions, and terminal disclaimers. This is not legal advice.
US8301675 began as a French-filed PCT application on July 7, 2006, entered the US national stage in January 2008, and didn't grant until October 30, 2012. Naive patent-term math — twenty years from the 2006 filing — put its death on July 7, 2026, and that's the date this site launched with.
The naive math was wrong. US law compensates applicants for Patent Office delay with patent-term adjustment (PTA), and a prosecution that runs from 2006 to 2012 earns a lot of it. The USPTO-listed adjusted expiration for this patent is March 2, 2029 — nearly three years past the estimate we published. Its maintenance fees are paid through the twelfth year. It is alive.
The same correction swept away the neat coincidence we launched with: three Sermo Inc. 'information brokering' patents (US8019637, US8019639, US10510087) share the same July 7, 2006 priority date, and we described all four dying on the same July morning. Verified against USPTO-adjusted data, they actually die one by one between November 2028 and June 2030. There is no busy death day; there never was.
What a claim to 'predicting the evolution of a chronological set of numerical values' covers is still broad enough to matter to ordinary time-series forecasting. Which is exactly why we're keeping this page up in corrected form: until March 2029, somebody building in that space still has to check.
Patent record: US8301675
Sources & further reading
Frequently asked questions
What happens on the countdown date?
That date is the patent's USPTO-adjusted expiration — verified individually against USPTO legal-status data (patent-term adjustment included) in July 2026. When it passes, the patent's term has ended and the claimed invention enters the public domain. It's still an estimate of status, not a legal ruling.
Is the countdown date guaranteed?
It's much stronger than raw patent-term math — each date on the countdown list was checked against USPTO-adjusted expiration data — but it still assumes maintenance fees keep being paid (a lapse would only make the death earlier), and it isn't a legal determination. Confirm against USPTO records before relying on it.
Can I build the invention once it expires?
Once the term ends, the specific claimed invention generally becomes free to make, use, or sell without a license. Other patents or rights may still cover a particular product; this isn't legal advice.