paragraph_text: The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on 6 December 1991 as ISO CD 11172. In most countries, patents cannot be filed after prior art has been made public, and patents expire 20 years after the initial filing date, which can be up to 12 months later for filings in other countries. As a result, patents required to implement MP3 expired in most countries by December 2012, 21 years after the publication of ISO CD 11172.

paragraph_text: In 1875, Bell developed an acoustic telegraph and drew up a patent application for it. Since he had agreed to share U.S. profits with his investors Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, Bell requested that an associate in Ontario, George Brown, attempt to patent it in Britain, instructing his lawyers to apply for a patent in the U.S. only after they received word from Britain (Britain would issue patents only for discoveries not previously patented elsewhere).

paragraph_text: John Stevens was a miller and inventor who lived in Neenah, Wisconsin. His inventions in flour milling revolutionized the process, leading to large-scale shifts in wheat-growing regions, and to the predominance of particular milling companies and mill-equipment manufacturers. Today Patent flour is still referred to due to Stevens' patents.

paragraph_text: The Paasche Airbrush Company is based in Chicago, Illinois. The company manufactures airbrushes, industrial spray guns, air compressors and related equipment. Paasche has been a manufacturer of airbrushes for over 100 years, based on patented designs.

paragraph_text: The idea for the original Eidophor was conceived in 1939 in Zurich by Dr. Fritz Fischer and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, with the first prototype being unveiled in 1943. A patent was granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (patent no. 2,391,451) to Friederich Ernst Fischer for the "Process and appliance for projecting television pictures" on 25 December 1945.

paragraph_text: As a last resort, he began working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City as a research engineer. Finding the work dull and routine, after a year Carlson transferred to the patent department as an assistant to one of the company's patent attorneys.

paragraph_text: In September 2007, during a lawsuit with patent holding company Burst.com, Apple drew attention to a patent for a similar device that was developed in 1979. Kane Kramer applied for a UK patent for his design of a "plastic music box" in 1981, which he called the IXI. He was unable to secure funding to renew the US$120,000 worldwide patent, so it lapsed and Kramer never profited from his idea.

paragraph_text: The basic MP3 decoding and encoding technology is patent-free in the European Union, all patents having expired there. In the United States, the technology will be substantially patent-free on 31 December 2017 (see below). The majority of MP3 patents expired in the US between 2007 and 2015.

paragraph_text: Sisvel S.p.A. and its U.S. subsidiary Audio MPEG, Inc. previously sued Thomson for patent infringement on MP3 technology, but those disputes were resolved in November 2005 with Sisvel granting Thomson a license to their patents. Motorola followed soon after, and signed with Sisvel to license MP3-related patents in December 2005. Except for three patents, the US patents administered by Sisvel had all expired in 2015, however (the exceptions are: U.S. Patent 5,878,080, expires February 2017, U.S. Patent 5,850,456, expires February 2017 and U.S. Patent 5,960,037, expires 9. April 2017.

paragraph_text: The first patent for a rotary dial was granted to Almon Brown Strowger (November 29, 1892) as U.S. Patent 486,909, but the commonly known form with holes in the finger wheel was not introduced until ca. 1904. While used in telephone systems of the independent telephone companies, rotary dial service in the Bell System in the United States was not common until the introduction of the Western Electric model 50AL in 1919.

paragraph_text: In September 2006, German officials seized MP3 players from SanDisk's booth at the IFA show in Berlin after an Italian patents firm won an injunction on behalf of Sisvel against SanDisk in a dispute over licensing rights. The injunction was later reversed by a Berlin judge, but that reversal was in turn blocked the same day by another judge from the same court, "bringing the Patent Wild West to Germany" in the words of one commentator.

paragraph_text: James Cuffey (October 8, 1911 – May 30, 1999) was an American astronomer. He specialized in photoelectric photometry and held the patent on the Cuffey Iris Photometer, an instrument used in stellar photographic photometry.

paragraph_text: Bell and his partners, Hubbard and Sanders, offered to sell the patent outright to Western Union for $100,000. The president of Western Union balked, countering that the telephone was nothing but a toy. Two years later, he told colleagues that if he could get the patent for $25 million he would consider it a bargain. By then, the Bell company no longer wanted to sell the patent. Bell's investors would become millionaires, while he fared well from residuals and at one point had assets of nearly one million dollars.

paragraph_text: In 1838, Claridge obtained patents in Scotland on 27 March, and Ireland on 23 April, and in 1851 extensions were sought for all three patents, by the trustees of a company previously formed by Claridge. This was Claridge's Patent Asphalte Company, formed in 1838 for the purpose of introducing to Britain "Asphalte in its natural state from the mine at Pyrimont Seysell in France", and "laid one of the first asphalt pavements in Whitehall". Trials were made of the pavement in 1838 on the footway in Whitehall, the stable at Knightsbridge Barracks, "and subsequently on the space at the bottom of the steps leading from Waterloo Place to St. James Park". "The formation in 1838 of Claridge's Patent Asphalte Company (with a distinguished list of aristocratic patrons, and Marc and Isambard Brunel as, respectively, a trustee and consulting engineer), gave an enormous impetus to the development of a British asphalt industry". "By the end of 1838, at least two other companies, Robinson's and the Bastenne company, were in production", with asphalt being laid as paving at Brighton, Herne Bay, Canterbury, Kensington, the Strand, and a large floor area in Bunhill-row, while meantime Claridge's Whitehall paving "continue(d) in good order".

paragraph_text: An exception is the United States, where patents filed prior to 8 June 1995 expire 17 years after the publication date of the patent, but application extensions make it possible for a patent to issue much later than normally expected (see submarine patents). The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S. Patents filed for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 a year or more after its publication are questionable. If only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding has been patent-free in the US since 22 September 2015 when U.S. Patent 5,812,672 expired which had a PCT filing in October 1992. If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology will be patent-free in the United States on 30 December 2017 when U.S. Patent 5,703,999, held by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and administered by Technicolor, expires.

paragraph_text: Bell's patent 174,465, was issued to Bell on March 7, 1876, by the U.S. Patent Office. Bell's patent covered "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically ... by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound" [N 16] Bell returned to Boston the same day and the next day resumed work, drawing in his notebook a diagram similar to that in Gray's patent caveat.

paragraph_text: Walter Lewis Hyde (1919-2003) was an American physicist, an early contributor to the field of fiber optics. He held patents for devices used in ophthalmology, as well as a panoramic rear-view mirror for automobiles.

paragraph_text: A patent does not give a right to make or use or sell an invention. Rather, a patent provides, from a legal standpoint, the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention for the term of the patent, which is usually 20 years from the filing date subject to the payment of maintenance fees. From an economic and practical standpoint however, a patent is better and perhaps more precisely regarded as conferring upon its proprietor ``a right to try to exclude by asserting the patent in court '', for many granted patents turn out to be invalid once their proprietors attempt to assert them in court. A patent is a limited property right the government gives inventors in exchange for their agreement to share details of their inventions with the public. Like any other property right, it may be sold, licensed, mortgaged, assigned or transferred, given away, or simply abandoned.

paragraph_text: Depending on a number of considerations, a company may apply for and be granted a patent for the drug, or the process of producing the drug, granting exclusivity rights typically for about 20 years. However, only after rigorous study and testing, which takes 10 to 15 years on average, will governmental authorities grant permission for the company to market and sell the drug. Patent protection enables the owner of the patent to recover the costs of research and development through high profit margins for the branded drug. When the patent protection for the drug expires, a generic drug is usually developed and sold by a competing company. The development and approval of generics is less expensive, allowing them to be sold at a lower price. Often the owner of the branded drug will introduce a generic version before the patent expires in order to get a head start in the generic market. Restructuring has therefore become routine, driven by the patent expiration of products launched during the industry's "golden era" in the 1990s and companies' failure to develop sufficient new blockbuster products to replace lost revenues.

paragraph_text: In March 1970, Larry D. Nichols invented a 2×2×2 "Puzzle with Pieces Rotatable in Groups" and filed a Canadian patent application for it. Nichols's cube was held together by magnets. Nichols was granted U.S. Patent 3,655,201 on 11 April 1972, two years before Rubik invented his Cube.

Question: When did the majority of the patents held by the company the Italian patents firm was representing expire?
Answer: 2015