Insurance patent
Open-knowledge reference entry
Under some patent laws, patents may be obtained for insurance-related inventions. Historically, patents could only cover the technological aspects of a new insurance invention. This is still the case in most countries. In the United States, however, recent court decisions have encouraged more inventors to file patent applications on methods of doing business. These patents may be used to get more comprehensive coverage of improvements in basic insurance processes, such as the methods of calculating insurance premiums, reserves, underwriting, etc. This is causing controversy in the insurance industry as some see it as a positive development and others see it as a negative development.
History
An early example of an insurance patent is U.S. patent 467,872 Means for Securing Travelers Against Loss by Accident. This patent was issued in 1892. It discloses a means for selling travelers' insurance by combining coupons with a newspaper.
A more recent example of an insurance patent is EP application 0700009 , granted as EP 0700009B "Individual evaluation system for motorcar risk".
“Insurance patent” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Insurance, patent and Open-knowledge can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Insurance patent” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Insurance, patent and Open-knowledge provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6042393. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1892.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Insurance patent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.