Extensions

Term, Adjustments, and Application History for U.S. Patent 6,199,048

As of April 28, 2026, an analysis of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) records for U.S. Patent 6,199,048 provides the following details regarding its term, related applications, and expiration.

Patent Term and Adjustments:

• Patent Term Adjustments (PTA) / Patent Term Extensions (PTE): A review of the patent's prosecution history indicates no awarded Patent Term Adjustments or Extensions. The application was filed before the effective date of the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999, which introduced the modern PTA system to compensate for certain USPTO processing delays. Therefore, the patent's term is not extended beyond the standard period.
• Projected Expiration Date: The patent has a priority date of June 20, 1995, based on a provisional application. Utility patents filed on or after June 8, 1995, have a term of 20 years from the earliest non-provisional filing date. The non-provisional application that led to this patent family (application Ser. No. 08/538,365) was filed on October 3, 1995. Therefore, the 20-year term expired on October 3, 2015. The patent is now in the public domain.

Application and Family History:

• Divisional Application: U.S. Patent 6,199,048 is a divisional application. Its direct parent is U.S. Patent 5,978,773 (issued from application Ser. No. 08/538,365). A divisional application is a separate application carved out from a parent application that originally contained more than one distinct invention. This allowed the inventors to pursue claims to a different invention that was disclosed in the original application. The application for patent 6,199,048 (Ser. No. 09/232,908) was filed on January 15, 1999.
• Continuation Applications: There are no direct continuation applications of U.S. Patent 6,199,048 itself. However, the patent is part of a larger family of applications that continued from the original 1995 filing.
• Patent Family Members: This patent is part of a family of related patents and applications that all claim priority to the original 1995 provisional and non-provisional applications. A patent family consists of a collection of patent applications filed in various countries that cover the same or similar inventions and are linked through priority claims. Key members of this patent's family include:
  • U.S. Patent 5,978,773: The direct parent application.
  • U.S. Patent 7,383,209: A continuation.
  • U.S. Patent 7,765,126: A continuation.
  • U.S. Patent 8,131,597: A continuation.
  • U.S. Patent 8,805,728: A continuation.
  • U.S. Patent Application Publication 2014/0361071: A continuation.

All patents within this family share the same priority date and, therefore, the same 20-year term, which concluded on October 3, 2015.