You've found a patent of interest but how do you know if
it's dead or alive, and if alive, when it expires, and what
exactly do those kind codes indicate?
I'll explore all these in a three part series of articles,
starting with where to find status information and what it
means.
Statuses
Some patent offices explicitly report the status of an
application, while others make you dig a little deeper, and some
make you work hard for that information. Before we get to who's
who and what's what, let's look at what the language around
statuses is.
At the most basic level a patent is dead or alive, but within
those labels there are a number of ways to describe where in the
patent lifecycle they are. Statuses in both categories are split
into pre-grant and post-grant. Every patent office has its own
language around statuses. Here's a selection.
