Contact

Email [email protected]. It is read by a person, and there is no form to fill in.

Reporting a correction

Corrections are the most useful thing you can send, and they are taken seriously. Please include the patent number and what you believe is wrong.

One thing worth knowing before you write: where the printed patent itself is odd — a misspelled cultivar name, a genus since reclassified, a botanical name that does not match the plant — the patent is reproduced as it stands and the discrepancy is noted alongside it. That is deliberate. The document is the legal record, and quietly correcting it here would make this site disagree with the thing it is reporting on. If you have found a case where the note is missing or wrong, that is a correction worth sending.

What this site cannot do

No legal advice. Expiration dates here are computed from the public record and checked against the patent document, but whether you may propagate, sell or name a particular plant is a legal question about your situation. A patent expiring frees the plant, not the name — trademarks, plant variety protection certificates and licence agreements all outlive a patent and none of them are tracked here. For anything that matters commercially, talk to an attorney.

No help filing a patent, and no contact details for breeders, inventors or attorneys beyond what the patent itself prints.

Name removal requests cannot be honoured. Inventor and assignee names appear here because they are printed on a published US patent, which is public record. Removing them from this site would not remove them from the record. See Privacy.

Using the data

The patent text and drawings are US public record, reproduced under 37 CFR 1.71(e). The expiration dates, cultivar-name resolution and groupings are this site’s own work. If you want to use them at scale, write and say what for — the answer is usually yes.

More about where the data comes from and how the dates are calculated is on the About page.