About Invention Index 8

Important Limitations

• ▸Expiry dates are estimates. Patent term depends on maintenance fees, patent term adjustment (PTA), patent term extension (PTE), terminal disclaimers, and other factors not fully captured in our data. Do not rely on estimated expiry dates without verification from official registers.
• ▸Legal status may be incomplete. Maintenance fee payment status, assignment history, litigation, and licensing information may not be current or available. A patent shown as “expired” may have active family members in other jurisdictions.
• ▸AI-generated content is speculative. Summaries, opportunity narratives, “Why Now” analyses, and application suggestions are generated by language models. They may contain inaccuracies, omissions, or unfounded inferences. Treat them as starting points for further investigation, not conclusions.
• ▸Patent data may be delayed. Data is ingested weekly from official sources. There may be a lag between a patent event (filing, grant, lapse) and its appearance in Invention Index 8.
• ▸Coverage is not global. Invention Index 8 currently focuses on USPTO, EPO, and WIPO data. Patents filed only in other offices (JPO, KIPO, CNIPA, etc.) may not appear.
• ▸Claims may be incomplete. Not all patents have full claims text available. Independent claim identification is heuristic-based.
• ▸Freedom to operate is not implied. An expired patent does not automatically mean an invention is free to use. Related patents, continuation applications, and active family members may still be in force.