News-Sentiment Trading Signal Backtester
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.
Stock market prediction using natural language processing · Fred Herz Patents, LLC · filed 2002-01-22 · granted 2012-10-09 · expired 2024-11-11
Playable, self-contained demo. Nothing is sent anywhere; it runs entirely in your browser.
The story
US8285619 claims using natural language processing on news text to predict stock market moves — filed January 22, 2002, back when 'natural language processing' meant hand-tuned linguistic rules and word-frequency statistics, not anything that could read a headline the way a modern model does.
Its long, decade-plus prosecution earned it a large patent-term adjustment, giving it an adjusted anticipated expiration of April 20, 2028 — but it never got there. The USPTO lists it as 'Expired — Fee Related': the owner, Fred Herz Patents, LLC, let a maintenance fee lapse around 2024, dropping the patent into the public domain years early. ChatGPT had launched in November 2022, and by the time of the lapse, running a language model over financial news and trading the sentiment had become a mainstream idea — one this patent's claims read squarely upon.
This is its full resurrection, not a loose gaming-style analogy: the exact patent behind this exact demo. Below, a working backtester runs sentiment scoring over headline text against historical price series — the pattern the 2002 filing described, playable with nobody's permission required.
See also: the fuller story of this patent, its adjusted term, and why it lapsed at exactly the wrong (right) moment, at /stories/nlp-us8285619.
Sources & further reading
Frequently asked questions
Can I use an expired or public-domain patent?
Once a patent's term ends or it lapses for non-payment, the invention it claimed generally enters the public domain and can be made, used, or sold without a license from the former owner. Separate copyrights, trademarks, or other patents may still apply to a specific product. This is general information, not legal advice.
Is an estimated date the same as a legal ruling?
No. Dates here are computed from public filing data and can differ from a patent's real status in either direction. Confirm against USPTO records before relying on one.
What does a maintenance-fee lapse mean?
US patents require maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after grant. If the owner stops paying, the patent lapses early and the invention enters the public domain years before its term would otherwise end.