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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
Live, client-side, flips automatically at the moment of expiry.
US8301675 — Computer system for predicting the evolution of a chronological set of numerical values
— · estimated expiry 2026-07-07
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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 2022-01-22
Filed in 2002, before 'NLP' meant much more than keyword rules and bag-of-words models. Expired ten months before ChatGPT shipped and NLP became a household word.
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
Filed in the bag-of-words era of natural language processing, this patent expired on its own timeline right before large language models made 'read the news, trade the sentiment' a mainstream idea.
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 30 dying now
Active trading patents expiring within 18 months, counting down live.
R.I.P.
Computer system for predicting the evolution of a chronological set of…
US8301675
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est. expiry 2026-07-07
R.I.P.
Method and apparatus for conducting an information brokering service
US8019637
Sermo, Inc.
est. expiry 2026-07-07
R.I.P.
Method and apparatus for conducting an online information service
US8019639
Sermo, Inc.
est. expiry 2026-07-07
R.I.P.
Method and apparatus for conducting an information brokering service
US10510087
Sermo, Inc.
est. expiry 2026-07-07
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 patent for 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.