Gelöscht

Gelöscht means extinguished. This happened to German patents for some reason. Maybe they were successfully contested during the Einspruchsfrist? We have seen this stamped onto some patents (e.g. Patent DE-1900-110813), despite their being ausgelegt and even ausgegeben.

IAM 1900, p. 97, lists two gelöschte patents. These numbers were entered into espacenet. One number yielded a different patent. The other yielded a matching record which will now enter our database as DE-1897-98288. According to IAM this patent was gelöscht in Spring 1900, nearly two years after it was ausgegeben. The scan of this patent does not show a Gelöscht stamp; it looks normal.

A possibility

The German patent system required renewals. Data on the renewal payments has been used to make inferences about which patents were "valuable". (See works of Jochen Streb.) In principle the inventor would be willing to pay lots of renewals/extension fees to a patent that was worth a lot, although something else might have stopped the inventor from renewing. And an inventor may just want to rack up the score by earning a patent, and not care to own the invention as property forever. Anyway I'd guess that a patent which was not renewed might have been said to be Gelöscht. -- Econterms (talk)