The exchange of information for patent rights is at the heart of the modern patent system. In fact, if information about patents is difficult and expensive to obtain, the public, inventors and businesses will lose confidence in the system. This has been one of the themes touched on in recent books such as Patent Failure and Innovation and Its Discontents that criticize current US patent laws. I would argue then that patent offices have a moral obligation and legal responsibility to disseminate patent information to the public in the most effective, efficient and economical manner possible. The playing field should be level so that everyone has the same access to patent information. This is reflected in the current mission statement of the USPTO, which includes the goal of "delivering IP information and education worldwide", as well as various statutes and regulations.
This is nothing new. Thomas Jefferson suggested in the early 1790s that inventors should publish at their own expense notices of their patent rights in federal court gazettes. He also proposed that patent documents and other technical publications be made available to the public in a national patent library. Nineteenth century patent commissioners, such as Gen. Leggett (1871-1874), took a lot of flak for their efforts to disseminate patent information. Leggett oversaw the first large-scale printing of patent specifications (made possible by the development of photolithography) and the introduction of the Official Gazette in the early 1870s. He was accused of wasting inventors' money, naiviety and even fraud. It's interesting to note that some private publishers applauded these initiatives. The Scientific American, which published patent abstracts and served as a kind of unofficial gazette from the 1840s-1860s, enthusiastically supported the OG. In one
editorial it even suggested that the OG would reduce examiners' workloads, as every applicant would be expected to consult the OG and only apply for patents on truly novel inventions.
The development of increasingly powerful and inexpensive ICT has been the greatest boon to the dissemination of patent information since the invention of photolithographic printing 150 years ago. Should patent offices take full advantage of ICT, open source software and the web to disseminate patent information. Absolutely. And these systems should meet current standards in functionality and design, e.g. PDF as the default standard for sharing electronic documents, faceted searching, etc.
Should the USPTO include patent status information, fee payments, etc. in its web-based patent databases? Of course. I suspect that the reason it hasn't taken steps to do so already has a lot of it has to do with old-fashioned bureacratic inertia, a hardened silo-and-stovepipe organizational structure and other, more urgent, priorities. The infrastructure for handling the various types of information generated by the patent system has grown up over decades. Like many government agencies, I think the USPTO has had a difficult time modernizing its legacy systems and historical workflows.
Mike White
----- Original Message ----
From: Gregory Aharonian <srctran_at_TheWorld.com>
To: "PIUG Discussion List @ Listbox" <piug_discussion_list_at_v2.listbox.com>
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 1:39:42 PM
Subject: [PIUG List] Should PTO add patent status to patent database?
I have two suggestions which I have to beleive are trivial to
implement:
1) The patent full text database available from the PTO
should indicate whether the patent is still active, i.e.,
the assignee has paid the latest maintenance fee.
2) For any U.S. patent application that has issued as a
patent, the returned text data for the patent application
should have a hyperlink for the corresponding issued patent.
I am sure others have the pet peeves, and maybe PIUG should make
a list and formally present it to the Patent Office. The PTO
search engines have always been retarded, decades behind real
search technology. But some of these fixes don't even require
new search engines, just a bit of ingenuity.
Greg Aharonian
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Received on Tue Aug 26 2008 - 16:36:35
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