Re: PAIR US Patent Status Data

Joerg Ohms wrote:

> Dear all:
>
> I am wondering whether the expiration of an US patent because of
> reaching the maximum lifetime is documented within the PAIR
> application data. For instance, US 4399216 should have been expired on
> 08-16-2000 (17 years after its issue; no patent extension filed).
> However, PAIR still states a "Patented Case". Could anybody help me in
> understanding this statement?
>
On the USPTO web site, an expiration due to failure to pay a maintenance
fee is listed.

But expiration due to the end of the patent term is a complicated
matter. As you probably know for older US patents the term is 17 years
from issuance, while for newer patents the term is 20 years from
filing. This leads to an odd situation for certain patents that issued
or were pending around the time of the change, for which the term is the
*longer* of the two terms. (Actually it is whichever term the patent
owner selects, although one must assume that nearly all patent owners
would select the longer of the two.)

In addition, depending on when they were filed, some patents may have a
"patent term extension" or PTE which changes the date that is the end of
the term. Still other patents, depending on when they were filed, may
have a "patent term adjustment" or PTA which likewise changes the date
that is the end of the term.

Finally, some US patents have a longer term that results from the
underlying product (typically a drug) taking a long time to be approved
by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The designers of the PAIR system did not want to try to do all of these
calculations and to present a single answer, since it is (as you can
see) not a simple calculation and it would be undesirable if through
some inadvertence an incorrect answer were provided in PAIR for some
particular patent.

So it is left to the inquiring party to determine for itself whether a
particular patent has expired.

Received on Fri Feb 11 2005 - 16:32:37