@pipeworx/patent-maintenance-fees

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Tools: 2

Tell whether a US patent is still in force, or has lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees — the one question the patents pack cannot answer, because its prosecution-event data has no fee field at all.

Tools

• get_patent_maintenance_status(patent_number) — every recorded maintenance-fee event for one patent (payments, surcharges, expiration for non-payment, reinstatement, entity-status changes), a computed status, and a 4th/8th/12th-year fee-window breakdown (due date, grace-period end, whether paid). Design (D-prefixed) and plant (PP-prefixed) patents are statutorily exempt from maintenance fees and report subject_to_maintenance_fees:false instead of a bare no-match.
• search_maintenance_fee_events(event_code?, patent_number_prefix?, date_from?, date_to?, limit?) — an exact total_matching count first, then a capped, newest-first sample of the matching events. Useful for questions like “how many patents expired for non-payment last quarter” — pass event_code: "EXP." and a date range.

Auth

Keyless.

Data source

USPTO, Patent Maintenance Fee Events — the Open Data Portal’s bulk-data product recording every maintenance-fee event for US patents granted 1981-09-01 to present. US federal data, public domain.

Why this is a local-copy pack, not a live proxy

Checked first, per CLAUDE.md’s local-copy rule: the ODP’s Patent File Wrapper search/get-by-number API — the one mcps/patents already calls — returns prosecution events (eventDataBag: filing, publication, grant, office actions) but has no maintenance-fee field at all. Maintenance-fee history is published only as the “PTMNFEE2” bulk product, a single weekly-cumulative file, with no per-patent query endpoint. The legacy keyless host this product used to publish from (bulkdata.uspto.gov) no longer resolves in DNS as of 2026-10-17, confirmed against two independent public resolvers (NXDOMAIN/NODATA, not a transient block) — the product is reachable today only through ODP’s own authenticated bulk-data API, which answers every /api/v1/* path 401/403 without an API key (the same credential type as the patents pack’s PLATFORM_USPTO_KEY). A bulk file with no per-record API is exactly the case CLAUDE.md’s sourcing rule calls for a refreshed backing store rather than a per-call upstream fetch.

This pack reads a Supabase mirror (uspto_maintenance_fee_events, schema in supabase/migrations/260_uspto_maintenance_fee_events.sql), loaded by scripts/ingest-uspto-maintenance-fees.mjs (.github/workflows/uspto-maintenance-fees-refresh.yml, dispatch-only — see below). Every response carries data_as_of from the mirror’s own loaded_at.

Not yet provisioned (as of the commit that added this pack)

Two things still need to happen before uspto_maintenance_fee_events has any rows, and both are outside what a commit-only build session can do:

1. An ODP API key as the USPTO_ODP_API_KEY repo secret. Get one free at https://data.uspto.gov/myodp (same credential type the gateway already holds server-side as PLATFORM_USPTO_KEY for the patents pack — stored again here because the refresh job runs outside the gateway Worker).
2. The first dispatch of uspto-maintenance-fees-refresh.yml. The ingest script’s fetch/discovery step (finding and downloading the latest MaintFeeEvents_*.zip via the ODP bulk-data API) follows the documented shape of that API but has never run against the live endpoint — no key was available in the build session that wrote it. It fails loudly and names the actual response shape if that shape doesn’t match, rather than mis-parsing silently; see the script’s header. The fixed-width record layout it parses afterward (57 bytes/record, USPTO’s own documented column offsets) is independently corroborated and covered by unit tests in scripts/__tests__/ingest-uspto-maintenance-fees.test.mjs.

Until both land, every tool call fails loudly with a dataset_unavailable error rather than silently reporting every patent as having no fee events — see “Empty-mirror guard” below.

Scale and load posture

The full file is ~27M event rows (one row per event, not per patent) as of 2026-10. The refresh workflow does a full TRUNCATE + psql \copy reload every run — the file is cumulative, so reprocessing it in full reproduces the correct complete history every time, the same “no delta logic to get subtly wrong” posture as scripts/ingest-faa-aircraft-registry.mjs. Because a 27M-row reload is a big load, the workflow is workflow_dispatch only (same shape as sec-13f-load.yml), not a cron — the first backfill should be run as a monitored one-off with a Supabase latency/PGRST002 check before and after, per Bruce’s 2026-09-30 “supa stagger” ruling for SEC 13F.

Empty-mirror guard

Same silent-zero class fixed for faa_reg_aircraft (fleet #2790): an empty backing table still answers REST queries successfully with zero rows, so a naive read would report every patent as having no maintenance-fee events — indistinguishable from a genuine miss against good data. Both tools check for at least one loaded row first and throw a loud dataset_unavailable error naming the real condition instead.

Scope — what this pack does NOT determine

Maintenance-fee lapse is one way a patent can stop being enforceable, not the only one. This pack does not determine:

• Full-term (20-years-from-filing) expiration. A patent with a perfect fee-payment record still expires at the end of its statutory term.
• Invalidity, reexamination outcomes, or litigation status.
• Design and plant patents at all — see below.

Pair with the patents pack for prosecution history and the epo-ops pack for non-US patents.

Design and plant patent exemption

35 U.S.C. 41(b) applies maintenance fees to utility and reissue patents only. Design (D-prefixed) and plant (PP-prefixed) patent numbers never generate a maintenance-fee event and never appear in this dataset. get_patent_maintenance_status detects the prefix and reports subject_to_maintenance_fees:false with an explanation, rather than a bare “no events found” that would read identically to a real gap.

Leading zeros — an open normalization question

Whether the file’s fixed-width patent-number column keeps or strips leading zeros has not been verified against a live file sample (no API key was available while building this pack — see “Not yet provisioned” above). get_patent_maintenance_status queries both the normalized form and the same value with leading zeros stripped, rather than assuming one.

Event codes

USPTO’s own long-stable maintenance-fee event codes (payments by window/entity-size/public-law era, surcharges, EXP./EXPX expiration/reinstatement, entity-status changes, petitions) are decoded in src/index.ts’s EVENT_CODES table with the raw code always included alongside the description — an uncommon or future code not in the table comes back with the raw code and a null description rather than a guess.

Tools

• get_patent_maintenance_status — Look up a US patent’s maintenance-fee history and in-force/expired status: every recorded maintenance-fee event (payments, surcharges, expiration for non-payment, reinstatement, entity-status changes)
• search_maintenance_fee_events — Search USPTO maintenance-fee events across patents by event code, patent-number prefix, and/or event-date range — e.g. all ‘EXP.’ (expired for non-payment) events in a date window. Returns an exact to