[Coco] Possible Coco patent?

[Aaron Banerjee]

I got it from the US Patent Office.  The patent could very well be  
expired, whether by age or not being maintained.  It is still in the  
Patent Office records.  For example, Eli Whitney's cotton gin (Patent  
#X72) is still in their records although it expired centuries ago.  It  
serves as prior art to prevent someone else from patenting the cotton  
gin.  (I have 4 cotton gins in my collection).

In the United States, when a patent expires, it becomes public  
knowledge.  Since it's public, no one can patent it again and prevent  
others from making, using, or selling it.  Please remember that the  
applicant can petition to revive a patent back to life, even if they  
didn't pay the maintenance fee, so long as the statutory period (I  
think it's 20 years from filing now) hasn't expired.

                         - Aaron

p.s.  I used to work at the patent office.  You probably won't have  
ever heard of any of the patents I ever issued except for the one for  
the idea of putting a device on a computer mouse that scrolls the  
screen.  Patent # 5,313,229.  It was originally a lever on the side of  
the mouse, but it really was the first "scroll wheel" -- or at least I  
couldn't find any prior art to reject it with.  The inventors were two  
fellows from Argentina.  Not Microsoft.

p.p.s.  The Patent Office has a pretty good search engine, however if  
you want copies of patents in .pdf form, once you already know the  
patent number, GOTO <http://www.pat2pdf.com>

p.p.p.s.  Perhaps I should have made a longer post and held off on all  
of the post scripts....




On Sep 21, 2008, at 10:24 AM, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> Not that it really makes a difference, but the patent was filed/ 
>> issued
>> long after a 1 Mhz, 32K machine would have been obsolete for most
>> purposes.  I just thought someone on this list might find it
>> interesting.
>>                                     - Aaron
>
> Where did you find this?  According to the above link, that patent  
> has been
> expired and expunged for non-payment of the maintenance fees on Nov  
> 5, 2004
> after the statutory number of years, in this case 8.
>
> Pat#				App#				Issued date
> 5,572,705                       08/180,848                         
> 11/05/96