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Thursday, February 08, 2007

Patent Data Dissemination - Challenges of the 21st Century.

Mr. Joff Wild recently

wrote in his

Blog:

"[...] But, again, if you look at FP7 there does not seem to be any IP-related requirements. Ownership of rights is discussed, but there dos not seem to be anything that obliges anyone using European money to ensure what results from the R&D in question is protected; which seems utterly ridiculous to me. But it gets even worse. There was a very brief presentation from Nigel Clarke who works on the EPO's Espacenet patent database, a source of close to 60 million patent documents from around the world. Clarke explained how it can be used to get an idea of whether proposed research work has already been carried out, but there is no obligation for anyone seeking FP7 money to consult it. Likewise, those evaluating FP7 applications will not be required to consult the database either. We are therefore faced with the possibility of Europe funding research that will lead to the creation of a product that has already been invented. We all know that this kind of thing happens in industry all the time, it just strikes me as bizarre that the EU is not doing all it can to ensure that it does not happen with public money. Quite simply, it displays a fundamental lack of joined up thinking. [...]"

There is no doubt that

esp@cenet ist one of the best products (if not the best product) in the field of patent information that we currently have. From esp@cenet general public can obtain nicely formatted PDF files each comprising a full patent document. And those documents can now be obtained in one large file, no longer on a page-by-page basis at it was not so long ago. Relevant patent documents can be identified by some sort of a full text search engine.

I am convinced that nicely formatted PDF patent documents are proper tools for Patent Office personnel, for patent owners and for patent attorneys because of they are very handsome representations of a single unique patent. However, for the general public seeking to gain any sort of overview over the patent situation in a particular field of technology patent documents are outdated and outmoded tools of the 20th century. Engineers and other employees in companies normally don't really like to read piles of patent documents supplied by the patent department or by an external patent attorney. They think that a duty to read such stuff resembles an imposition or even unreasonable demand. One reason is that lists of potentially relevant patent documents generated by full-text keyword search often comprise utterly irrelevant documents, and it is tedious to go through dozens, if not hundreds of patent documents for separating a small amount of wheat from a huge amount of chaff.

One fascinating aspect of the

Peer-to-Patent project (which perhaps might be

operational in April 2007) is that not only prior art is identified for use by the Patent Examiner but also that volunteers outside the Patent Office get in touch with patent data in a structured way based on state-of-the-art IT technologies. But this side-effect of that project can be seen only as a start.

In my view it is overdue that Patent Offices sitting on huge amounts of raw data get involved into a political debate as to how and by which technical measures the general public can exploit the knowledge frozen therein in an advanced way. Preferably there should be some XML based standard representation for patent raw data, and as many of the Patent Offices of the World as possible should open their raw data treasure chambers.

The European Patent Office appears to be a vanguard so far as they are offering some sort of a SOAP-based interface enabling access to raw data.

One of the primary aims could be to encourage and to facilitate the creation of interesting patent-related

mash-up applications by a multitude of vendors.

And, encouraging development of florishing mash-up applications does not go well with demanding a fee for providing raw data. Many Patent Offices want to see cash in return for raw data, in some cases marginal costs in the amount of a few thousands of Euros per year. But the patent applicants have already paid for the publication of their applications through the Official application fees, and demanding even small amounts of money increases transaction costs and hinders the development of a large number of mash-up applications.

I do not pretend having the ultimate mash-up killer application up my sleeve but I would expect that some brilliant ideas might come up after some time.

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