Extensions — US Patent US6098106

Analysis of US Patent US6098106

Patent Term and Expiration

Patent Term Adjustments (PTA) / Extensions (PTE): There are no recorded Patent Term Adjustments or Extensions for US Patent US6098106. The application was filed on September 11, 1998, and issued on August 1, 2000. Under the patent laws of the time, this prosecution period (less than two years) was relatively swift and did not trigger any statutory extensions for USPTO-caused delays.
Projected Expiration Date: The patent was filed before the enactment of the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999, which introduced PTA for applications filed on or after May 29, 2000. Therefore, its term is calculated as 20 years from the earliest non-provisional filing date.
- Filing Date: September 11, 1998
- Term: 20 years from filing date
- Calculated Expiration: September 11, 2018

The patent is now expired and has been since September 11, 2018.

Continuity and Family Members

US Patent US6098106 is part of an extremely large and complex family of patents stemming from the original work at Digital Convergence.com Inc. The application that matured into this patent, US09/151,530, serves as a priority document for a vast number of subsequent applications.

Continuation and Divisional Applications: The patent document for US6098106 does not explicitly list "child" continuation or divisional applications in a "Related U.S. Application Data" section, which is common in modern patents. However, the public record and the "priority to" information provided by patent databases show that application US09/151,530 is the parent application for dozens of other patents. These later patents claim priority back to the 1998 filing date of the '106 patent's application.
Notable Family Members: While an exhaustive list would be extensive, the application for US6098106 established the priority date for a wide portfolio of patents assigned to Digital Convergence.com Inc. This portfolio covers various methods and systems related to linking physical media (through barcodes, audio tones, etc.) to network resources. The numerous patents listed in the "Priority to" section of the patent's record (such as US6970914B1, US7043536B1, US6629133B1, etc.) are all part of this extended family, forming a web of related inventions that build upon or are variations of the concepts disclosed in the original 1998 application.
International Family Members: The U.S. application also served as the basis for international filings under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), such as PCT/US1999/020963, which led to the grant of patents in other jurisdictions, including Europe (EP1008052A4) and Japan (JP4768092B2), among others. This indicates a strategy by the original assignee to seek broad international protection for this technology.