Hi All - We made a website to search for inactive patents – first we did the US and that works fine: https://freeip.uwo.ca/ The idea being you can use anything there to build open hardware.
Next we added the Japanese database but were limited on the years without sending Japan’s Patent Office a harddrive as they do not allow bulk downloads. We did this (small USB stick) - but they are only allowed to mail it to someone in Japan.
What we need - someone living in Japan willing to have the USB mailed to them from the JPO and then either physically mail it to us - or better yet – just email us the files/upload onto the OSF.io so we can complete the database. As a reward for doing this you can keep the USB!
If you are currently living in Japan or know someone who is that could help us - it would be most appreciated!
Are you sure all the patents are inactive? I keep getting “active” patents when searching for gallium nitride related patents. Im curious to know if this website shows worthless patents as well as expired patents?
Wow - thank you! We finally figured out the issue; it turns out the maintenance fee parser was reading the wrong column from the USPTO file (application number instead of patent number). This went unnoticed for a while because the two number ranges didn’t overlap until USPTO hit 12 million issued patents last year.
We’ve fixed the parser, cleaned up the database, and added some safeguards so this can’t happen again. The site is back up with correct data.
Fantastic! I searched again “gallium nitride” patents and the results are different. Now most of the results I checked show “Expired - Fee related” as the current status. Thank you for fixing this issue.
