Peer-To-Patent Project Set On Hold. Now, Free Patent Data

The Peer-To-Patent project had even been endorsed by the new Obama administration in Washington D.C. as an example in the context of the Open Government Initiative:

It is a pity that this project might perhaps not be carried on; however, in view of some anti-patent sentiments in particular in circles of Internet-savvy geeks & nerds it was not that surprising that the support from the Internet users turned out to be quite a trickle.

Moreover, I won't exclude that the Peer-To-Peer project was a bit too much designed in a top-down manner. No doubt that the people behind the project had considerable expertise as well as with regard to Internet technologies as well as of patent law and practice. However, by implementing this particular website they had just one shot, and it looks as if it wasn't a success.

I would dare to suggest a slightly different approach: The three big Patent Offices of the Trilateral Co-operation (U.S.-PTO, EPO, JP-PTO) might start a project to make their files open on the Internet and linkable.

On the one hand and at the time being, services like esp@cenet convey a big service to the general public by offering patent documents in PDF format for free. Moreover, esp@cenet also allows permanent links to individual patent documents. This is fine, but not yet sufficient.

On the other hand, services like epoline.org enable a much deeper insight into a patent file: every single document filed by the applicant or produced by EPO staff can be accessed in PDF format for free. However, epoline.org does not allow links to individual documents in the file wrappers.

I think it might be interesting to re-design epoline.org in a manner such that every single document gets a permanent URL of its own. Moreover, meta-data for each and every linkable document should be available in XML format according to some open standard. All that under some suitable Open Database License (ODbL).

And, similar projects should be undertaken by U.S.-PTO as well as by JP-PTO.

What would be the benefit?

Well, I imagine that some start-up companies might be founded over the time, utilising this freely linkable stuff in a number of ways useful for members of the public. Perhaps some sort of entrepreneur has a better idea of how to collect information concerning an individual parent than it was hard-coded in the Peer-To-Peer software. Or, a university somewhere takes a stance and starts developing some application.