I am only leaving in this up here in the interest of being transparent about my learning process. It is bad code, don't write Python code like this. When I wrote this, I had not yet finished Downey's Think Python and I had some ideas from listening to Talk Python, the podcast. There are so many things that I would change.
But anyway, I managed to get it deployed for a short time on pythonanywhere, so it is the first time I considered myself a full stack web developer. You enter a patent number, and it told you if it was expired or not (kind of).
I wrote it because I saw a presentation for a legal tech startup that wanted to provide this service for $40 a pop. I thought it was silly since I could (even then) write the MVP for it in a couple of weekends. I more or less did.
I have a bunch of ideas about how to use this use case to illustrate async Python, since the patent API is async. One day.