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Friday, April 14, 2006

Patent Information: Scaling Problems.

One of the more common theories (there are many others) of the patent system says that the inventor or applicant, when filing for a patent, gets an exclusive right to the respective patented invention only in return for a public disclosure thereof.

But how can the public take in the stream of public disclosure generated by the patent system for some sort of intellectual digesting?

In the early times of our modern patent system, there had been two basic instruments for accomplishing the second part of this theory:

The Official Gazette edited by the Patent Office giving lists of recently granted patents, and

Typeset printed paper copies of patent documents, to be ordered and billed on a one-by-one basis.

This ancient technical means had worked well for smaller numbers of patent applications. But do they also scale well in a world with literally millions of patent documents generated annually?

I am seriously in doubt.

Ok, I greatly appreciate that now, roughly ten years after the begin of the popularisation of the World Wide Web, we have reached a state of the affairs where PDF files of patent documents ara available on the Internet for free download in a single file without need for boring page-by-page download-and-printing exercises. And some offices like the EPO have implemented a very convenient system for patent status queries and file inspections. However, others did not, for example the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. You have to register for DPINFO access, and there is no electronic file inspection.

But that what has been reached so far can, in my view, even in case of the EPO be seen only as some kind of an absolute minimum of information services necessary to defend the patent system.

As far as I know patent documents are not a most popular reading in the companies affected by the patent system.

A first reason might be that the language of patent documents is not that of the ordinary man on the street. It is also not the language of the engineers and scientists. The reason is the necessary double-nature of patent documents embodying at the same time a technical disclosure document as well as a legal document.

But a second reason is that it appears to be utterly difficult to locate relevant documents in the haystack of millions of other documents. Here probably more Internet-based technology could and should step in.

In practice, some companies maintain sort of a search contract with a patent document supplier. They get, on a weekly or monthly basis, a stack of piled-up patent documents selected by patent classification, keywords or identity of the applicant. Then the paper documents are circulated amongst staff members. This appears to be somewhat time-consuming and ineffective. It certainly does not boost the popularity of exploiting patent documents. Perhaps some measures might ease the situation a little:

Providing individualised RSS feeds with data on selected patent documents. This looks as if it should not be uttlerly difficult to obtain but up to now I do not have seen such a thing.

Implementing collaborative filtering mechanisms in order to facilitate the discrimination between important and less important patents. The Community Patent Project (no, not that one) goes a step into this direction. If in the industry there would be a generally accepted culture of participation in a peer-to-peer-assisted patent system, then I should be inclined to assume that this not only would effectively reduce the number of illiegitimate patents but also significantly increase the general awareness and knowledge amongst engineers employed by the industry about important patents in a given field of technology. This might well pay off for the employer not only by avoiding unnecessary infringement lawsuits but also by benefiting from a broader knowledge of the employees with regard to the technology of the competitors.

Undertaking attempts to accomplish a technology transfer concerning data mining and knowledge management technologies towards more widespread applications in the field of patent information processing.

Many aspects of such proposals would point into the direction of value-added services which might not be expected to be provided for free by the Patent Offices. However, I really could imagine that e.g. the EPO should provide at least IPC-specific RSS feeds for free.

Concerning value-added services to be offered by others, the major suppliers for raw data would be, of course, the Patent Offices. Despite the fact that their patent information retail business is now for free,

they want to see money for their wholesale raw data business. Still more annoying is the attitude e.g. of the EPO to claim rights on patent raw data as "proprietary information" as you

have to accept if you have "reseller status".

The

corresponding version of the Standard Agreement of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office [In German, sorry] appears to be still more preposterous. They earnestly require that the user of raw data makes sure that any piece of secret information accidentially put into the data streams by the Office is filtered out and kept under secrecy by the other party to the contract. If the Office amends data, the data user is obliged to communicate this to each and every of his or her customers.

Such kind of "Standard Agreement" might render open collaborative Internet-based projects concerning patent information virtually impossible. This surely is not the way patent information should be distributed and managed in the age of the Internet. The patent applicants have already paid for the publication of patent documents with their fees. And not a single one institution in the patent business would, in a time where the overall economic efficieny of the patent system is put into question in its entirety, do itself a favour in hampering the free flow of patent information over the Internet.

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Good points, constructive criticism.

Intrestingly I wrote about patent scaling in my EU consultation contribution in a slightly different context which does not apply here.

Regardless all these EPLA/Compat etc. discussions the European Union has to set quality and access standards for patent information systems.

# posted by André Rebentisch : 14 April, 2006 15:40

A friendly reader of my Blog was kind enough to make me aware of this URL here:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/rssfeed.html

Great, but this website appears to cover the US-PTO on the basis of national U.S. patent classes only.

I would very much like to see the same thing for the EPO based on the International Patent Classification (IPC).

# posted by Axel H Horns : 17 April, 2006 20:47

I think making the raw data available is the most important part, creating nice interfaces (like RSS) is secondary as it probably will happen by the community anyway.

http://ops.espacenet.com is a good start, but currently lacks showing information like descriptions and claims. More importantly, it only supports retrieval of information, not (yet?) searching, afaics.

# posted by raboof : 18 April, 2006 15:06

I have programmed RSS feeds for all classes for all published patent documents of the European Patent Office at

http://pct.ipnewsflash.com

It is still in beta and will be released soon. Give it a try.

Rolf Claessen

# posted by Anonymous : 27 October, 2007 07:51

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Please read the Disclaimer & About This Website (Pflichtangaben gemäss TDG) section. Feel free to contact PA Axel H Horns via e-mail horns@ipjur.com. BEWARE: DO NOT SEND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION UNENCRYPTED VIA E-MAIL. USE OF ENCRYPTION SOFTWARE IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. PA AXEL H HORNS IS PROVIDING SUPPORT FOR ENCRYPTED E-MAIL MESSAGES USING PGP OR PGP COMPATIBLE FORMATS. THE PGP PUBLIC KEY FOR PA AXEL H HORNS IS AVAILABLE HERE. THE GnuPG PUBLIC KEY FOR PA AXEL H HORNS IS AVAILABLE HERE. Dipl.-Phys. Axel H Horns is Patentanwalt (German Patent Attorney), European Patent Attorney as well as European Trade Mark Attorney. In particular, he is Member of:
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