ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,623,871, issued on May 12, was assigned to Jackpocket LLC (New York).

"Systems and methods for scraping physical media elements using presence-based operation" was invented by Eric Parker (Wellington, Fla.), James Mansour (Austin, Texas), Milan Smart (Austin, Texas), Cameron Navarre (Austin, Texas), Elias Bachaalany (Fidar, Lebanon) and Imad Maalouf (Awkar, Lebanon).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods for mechanically processing physical media elements, e.g., automatically scratching scratch-off lottery tickets, may include receiving a batch of tickets at an input chute of a scratching system. Tickets may be serially fed thr...