--- title: "Bought In A Lot Of 1,900 Patents. Lapsed For An Unpaid $1,600." dek: "Eleven patents from that lot were flagged for technical review. This one was not. No employee of the buyer appears ever to have read it. It has been free for anybody to build since 2017. We had one built." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Suppressed Science author: Dr. Ilse Vantongeren and Harriet Kwon-Massey (fictional) published: 2026-08-20T11:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/bulk-lot-of-nineteen-hundred tags: patents, USPTO, ultracapacitors, energy storage, Northmark IP Trust genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # Bought In A Lot Of 1,900 Patents. Lapsed For An Unpaid $1,600. *Eleven patents from that lot were flagged for technical review. This one was not. No employee of the buyer appears ever to have read it. It has been free for anybody to build since 2017. We had one built.* The fee was $1,600. That is the whole of the burial. On 16 June 2017 the grace period ran out on the second maintenance fee for United States Patent 7,548,412, nobody paid it, and the most frequently cited example of a suppressed energy patent fell into the public domain — where it has sat, free for anybody in the world to build, for nine years. Nobody has built it. So we did. ## The chain everybody describes The chain is real, and the version told about it is not wrong about a single transfer. Halvard Achterberg-Musa worked on laminated capacitor electrodes from 1996, in a rented unit outside Utica, with one employee. He filed in March 2003 and the patent granted in June 2009: a stacked electrode claiming 38 watt-hours per kilogram, against roughly nine for anything you could buy that year. His company was wound up in 2011. A court-appointed receiver listed the patent as asset 214. In 2012 it was bought by Northmark IP Trust, a defensive aggregator whose subscribing members included three of the largest lithium-cell manufacturers in the world. Inventor, receiver, industry. That is the story as it is normally told, and every link in it is documented in the recorded assignments, which we have published. > **Figure:** Who owned US 7,548,412, and for how much — see https://theyburied.com/article/bulk-lot-of-nineteen-hundred ## What the assignment record does not say It does not say what Northmark paid, because assignments do not carry prices. Northmark's own bankruptcy docket does. Lot 2012-14: 1,900 patents, $3,192,000, an average of $1,680 each. The lot's acquisition diligence log is exhibit 44-C. It is eleven pages. It lists eleven patents pulled out for technical review by a named attorney, with dates and initials. Asset 214 is not one of the eleven. It appears once in the entire Northmark record, on the schedule of assets acquired, as a number and a title. No board paper mentions it. It was never licensed, never asserted, never offered to a member, never valued separately. We asked the former head of acquisitions directly whether any human being at the company had read the specification. Her answer is printed below and it is no. ## What a renewals rule is In 2016 the second maintenance fee came due. Northmark did not decide to abandon the patent. There was no meeting. There was a rule, written down, in the same exhibit: at each maintenance window, drop anything carrying no forward citations, no assertion history and no member request. Four hundred and twelve patents went out of the portfolio that cycle. A renewals contractor executed the list. The invoice line for asset 214 reads $1,600 and it was never raised. > You are describing a filing cabinet and calling it a burial. > > — Beatrix Sandoval-Okri ## We had it built Because the patent lapsed, anybody may build it. We wanted to know whether that mattered. We sent the complete file — claims, drawings, the two examiner actions — to a university materials group under Dr. Anneke Ferreiro-Baptiste, with $18,600 and no context at all. They were not told where it came from, who had owned it, or what anybody had ever claimed about it. They were told to build what the document describes and to cycle it. They built it twice. The best cell reached 15.6 watt-hours per kilogram: 41 per cent of the claimed figure, and still respectable against the shelf of 2009. It then delaminated, comprehensively, at 600 cycles. The layer separation is visible in the report's photographs without magnification. That report is published entire, including the first attempt, which failed at 140 cycles for reasons the group attributes to their own press. ## The 1998 entry Ruth Achterberg-Musa kept her husband's notebooks in a cupboard for fifteen years, and drove them ninety miles to us in a hotel car park because we asked her to. Four of the seven survive. In the third, dated 14 September 1998, four and a half years before he filed, he writes out the delamination problem, sketches the shear at the layer boundary, and puts down two possible fixes. Underneath, in the same pen: *A year on this, probably less.* He died in November 2010, seven months before the receiver was appointed. His widow says he was still on it. ## What this desk takes from it There is no burial here. There is a receiver's schedule, a bulk purchase, a scoring rule and an unpaid invoice, and every step of it was somebody doing their job correctly at a price that made sense to them. What the desk cannot get past is the nine years since. The document has been free to anybody with a printer since June 2017, and in that time the number of people who have attempted to build it appears to be one, and we paid them. The suppression everybody argues about lasted five years and cost $1,680. The silence afterwards was free, and it is still going on. ## Sources (invented) - Recorded assignments for US 7,548,412, United States Patent and Trademark Office — Pulled from the public assignment database and reconciled against the reel-and-frame images; published with this story (March–May 2026) - Northmark IP Trust acquisition diligence log, lot 2012-14, Exhibit 44-C, Northmark's own Chapter 7 docket, 2021 — Obtained from the docket for a copying charge of $34 (April 2026) - Ruth Achterberg-Musa, Widow of the inventor — Interviewed twice at length; supplied four laboratory notebooks, which have been returned (May and July 2026) - Dr. Anneke Ferreiro-Baptiste, Materials group that fabricated and cycled the electrode — Given the patent file and no context whatever; commissioned at $18,600; report published entire (May–August 2026) - Beatrix Sandoval-Okri, Former head of acquisitions, Northmark IP Trust — Interviewed on the record by telephone; read the full draft; replied in writing (June–August 2026) ## What we could not confirm - Whether the notebooks are complete. Mrs. Achterberg-Musa gave us four; the spines are numbered and the numbering runs to seven. She says the others went missing in a house move in 2009 and we have no way to test that. - Whether anyone at Northmark read the specification informally, over a desk, without recording it. Our evidence is an absence in a log, which is weaker than a log of absence, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. - Whether our fabrication is a fair test of the claims. Dr. Ferreiro-Baptiste's group followed the file exactly. The widow says her husband had two lamination steps he never wrote down, and if she is right our 41 per cent is a floor and not a verdict. ## Right of reply **Beatrix Sandoval-Okri, former head of acquisitions, Northmark IP Trust** (Replied in writing on 8 August 2026. Printed in full and unedited.): > I am the person who signed for lot 2012-14 and I will answer for it, but I would like to answer for what it was rather than for what your headline implies. > > You have established that nobody at my company read this patent. That is correct. Nobody read 1,889 of them. A bulk lot is not a shopping list, it is a hedge: you buy a portfolio because its aggregate blocks a class of claims against your members, and the price reflects exactly that. Sixteen hundred and eighty dollars a patent is not the price of a technology. It is the price of a lottery ticket against being sued, and everyone on both sides of that table knew it. > > Reading 1,900 specifications properly is about twenty thousand attorney hours. At the rates of 2012 that is more than four times what we paid for the lot. You are criticising us for not spending four dollars to inspect one dollar's worth of goods, and if we had, you would be writing about a wasteful aggregator instead. > > On the lapse. There was no decision to abandon this patent, because there was no meeting at which it was discussed. There was a rule, and the rule was written down and is in the exhibit you have: at each maintenance window, drop anything with no forward citations, no assertion history, and no member request. Four hundred and twelve patents went that way in the 2016 cycle. It was not malice and it was not even inattention, exactly. It was a policy, executed correctly, by a contractor paid to execute it. > > And now the part you will not like. Your own fabrication is the vindication of that rule, not the indictment of it. You paid a competent university group nineteen thousand dollars, you gave them the file, and they got 41 per cent of the claimed capacity and a delamination at 600 cycles. A screen that discards patents nobody cites and nobody asserts, and that in this instance discarded a patent that does not do what it says, is a screen that is working. > > You are describing a filing cabinet and calling it a burial, and then you are surprised when the filing cabinet behaves like one. > > What I will concede, and I have thought about it since your letter arrived, is the nine years. The thing has been free since 2017 and no one has tried it, and that is not our doing and it is not the widow's. If your story causes three graduate students to open that file, it will have done more for the invention than either my company or its inventor's creditors ever managed, and I would rather that than be right about my paperwork. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.