About

What this is

Outer Rim Archives is a reading log. Once a week an automated sweep queries the United States Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Public Search for every newly published application and granted patent naming The Walt Disney Company, Disney Enterprises, or Lucasfilm as assignee or applicant. It pulls the full text, sorts each filing as hardware, notable software, or set aside, scores the kept ones for their kinship to lightsaber, droid, animatronic and show-effect work, and publishes the result here — 3389 filings so far, 2017 to 2026.

How the sorting works

Two stages. A deterministic triage — patent classification codes plus keyword rules, fitted on several thousand hand-reviewed verdicts — decides keep or set aside and is deliberately biased toward keeping. A short weekly review then corrects the handful of new keeps: category, one-line note, and the kinship rank. High means the mechanism is the kind of thing a saber, droid, animatronic or show effect is made of; Medium means it plausibly feeds that work; Low means it was worth keeping but is far from the crafts of Batuu. The ranking is an editorial opinion about mechanisms, not a claim about what anyone will build.

Set aside, not hidden

Every filing the sweep reads appears on this site, including the ones it chose not to keep — with the reason. A complete record is more useful than a curated one, and it keeps the sorting honest.

Corrections

Every page carries the patent number and links to the public copy of the document. If a summary is wrong, the document is the authority, not this site.

Disclaimer

Editions

6 weekly editions so far, the first on 2026-07-17. An RSS feed carries new editions.