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Delphion To Start Charging For Patent Access
adenied writes: "According to this Delphion is going to start charging for full access to their patent database starting June 1. The only thing that will be available will be U.S. bibliographic data. For those of you who don't remember, Delphion is the company that is running the old IBM patent server womplex.patent.ibm.com. This really sucks. Anyone know other free patent servers out there on the net?" Thanks to IBM, there has been amazing free access to these files for a while. But as a public office, it seems reasonable to me that the USPTO be required to make their patent files, well .. public, actually.
I think the money paid by those applying for patents more than recoups any costs associated with putting a patent database on-line.
I don't see how wanting the patent office to provide access to its files conflicts w/ Libertarian ideology. More likely the concept of patents itself conflicts. Libertarian writings tend to say that the reason for monopolies is that government creates them. This happens to be one of those ways.
It's annoying.. but better than yet another failed .com business. Giving away information for free can't last forever.
So reasonable that they've already done it. See www.uspto.gov for a searchable index.
Here it is.
Now pay up.
the people who use it should pay for it.
I agree completely. The USPTO was set up to grant inventors a limited monopoly in return for disclosing their invention. Who profits from the monopoly? Not me; not you; certainly not the taxpayer. Who then?
The patent holders!
So who is using the patent office?
The patent holders!
Who should pay to make their patents publicly available?
The patent owners!
Patents already work on a 'subscription' basis - you have to pay every so often to renew your patent, up to the limit of 20 years (IANAL - correct me if needed). my somewhat immodest proposal is this...
Make the patent office self-supporting. You and I get access to all the patents on the internet. The USPTo charges a variable fee every year to cover their costs. Any profits are returned to the patent holders (sort of like an income tax refund).
All in favor?
The US Patent files have ALWAYS been public (since the founding of the UPTO over 200 years ago anyway).
Anyone can saunter into the USPTO and peruse the files.
It's a very different question as to whether a government agency should be required to spend taxpayer dollars to make their files freely available on the internet. The cost for doing so is non-trivial; many would argue that the people who use it should pay for it.
Would you expect to go to the USPTO and not have to pay for use of the photocopy machine ? I wouldn't.
A coward anonymous wrote: "Public information does not mean everyone gets a free copy of it, just that everyone can peruse it. The fact it was available free online was a gift, not a right."
... does someone in Washington, Alaska have the same right to peruse Patent Office materials as someone in Washington, D.C.? I'd rather seem them close the physical visiting location (if necessary, not that it need be) than exclude for all practical purposes nearly everyone in the country. If it's online, available for downloading as a PDF, that actually does give anyone the ability to peruse it. Does everyone have a computer and an ISP? No -- but available screentime is easier to obtain than a trip to Washington. Public libraries in all of the various towns I've ever lived in (from tiny to humousgous) are now equipped with computers.
Two objections, at least:
1) Define "everyone" in the context of "everyone has a right to peruse it" which I think is a fair paraphrase of what you said there. OK, sticking with citizens of particular countries' own patent offices, and in the U.S.
2) For IBM / Delphion to host that info *is* (and is about to become "was") a gift, not a right. Their online tools are better than the ones offered by the patent office itself, too. But in an age where the information can be put online with a similar application of effort to making it available only in person (and with a lot of other practical advantages too -- say, internal use by patent examiners), I'd say it is the burden of the government we pay for to be transparent unless there is a compelling reason for it not to be. So having that information *is* a right, though whether online is the best place for it may be something we disagree about. The USPTO will probably always be behind private companies in its interface etc (it's underfunded and a part of the government), but yes, the right to the knowledge it produces is shared by every citizen. That's exactly what the Net can allow!
On the other hand, bandwidth charges might be reasonable, to prevent people from simply slurping the info up all day at other taxpayers' expense, but they should be conservative and not exact an undue burden, just enough to cover actual used bandwidth / CPU time.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
You can use the pat2pdf script to get nicely
formatted pdf formatted patents.
The Library of Congress is certainly public but this does not mean that every work is available online.
/do/) a way to insert a gene into an apple that gives it fireblight immunity. Let's then put that up in a USPTO Auction and give the commercial rights to the highest bidder.
Fail to read a book before writing your own, and you might miss some entertainment or information. (The likelyhood of you writing the same book that's there is... well... has anyone got a bunch of monkeys and typewriters?)
Fail to read a patent before making/releasing your own invention, and open yourself to significant liabilities.
The same goes for coming up with that awesome product name - failing to search the trademark database and you might end up spending years paying someone else for the damage.
That all said, I think another metaphor might yield better results. Persons who obtain FCC radio licenses (amateur, commercial, etc.) have to study material and pass a test prior to obtaining the license. Even when the test is passed, they still pay an application fee for the license. Patents are a license of a sort - a grant to exclusivity in many ways similar to the purchase of FCC-administered spectrum.
How about an alternate approaches to patents? Since DNA and arguably all other "inventions" existed in nature and were discovered rather than invented, why don't we instead treat them as a public asset and auction them off to the highest bidder?
Say I discover through DNA research (or whatever it is they
Then, we'll take 10% of the winning bid price and give it to me for the discovery. If I want to commercialize it, then I'd better be the highest bidder too (and end up paying myself that 10%, so I have a built-in discount of 10% if I win - fair credit to the inventor).
This process would then *strongly* encourage patent licensees to actually commercialize and use their patent, rather than acquire them only to sqelch use. (I.e. if you can afford $5 billion and not use the technology, you'll probably suffer the consequences).
The bidding process does another thing by putting up a proposed new invention for sale. It allows disclosure of the proposed invention prior to its assignment - something seriously absent in today's process.
Imagine the FCC announcing a planned auction of 144 MHz to 148 MHz - they'd hear very quickly that someone already has that license. That might have a similar effect with respect to these foolish patent give-aways.
*scoove*
I think that by no longer offering this free service, IBM has given everyone a "heads up" on the fact that it really was an "amazing free service" that they were providing. The other thing is that IBM is being responsible to it's shareholders by cutting back on excess costs incurred by providing a service that is already provided for free by the us patent office as already pointed out by countless posts above.
try: wget --mirror
Be VERY careful with that.
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I don't understand this crowd. One minute, you're all spouting Libertarian rhetoric, the next, you're demanding that others foot the bill.
The records are available. They may not be made in the most convenient form, but the information is available.
If you want everything done for you, someone has to pay for it. If you want the wonderfully formatted patents, pony up the cash. Someone has to foot the bill.
The patent office makes them available, but should our taxes be raised to subsidize everything? People doing patent research can pony up the money and pay for this service.
Has it occured to anyone here that people's time costs money?
I forgot, this is Slashdot. Once you incorporate, you have an obligation to do things for the Slashdot crowd, give them your research, etc.
Give me a break.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. TANSTAAFL
Alex
The PTO site does return images in TIFF format. AlternaTIFF, a free browser plug-in (Netscape, IE, Opera, Win32) handles them well. Printing works, and gets you a clean, high-quality copy of the patent.
I don't understand....
You can search for and read patents online at http://www.uspto.gov/main/patents.htm
Where's the problem ?
Admittedly they do charge for the nicely formatted PDF or paper versions, but it's not that bad...
What's next? Delphion will probably patent their patent-searching engine. =)
Even if it was just for internal document management purposes, it would be cheaper for the US government to scan documents than to route them around in paper form. A fast Internet connection costs a significant amount of money when purchased in the free market, but the US government has negotiated contracts for free Internet services based on giving companies access to public infrastructure to put in fiber, etc., and the cost to Internet providers is small.
In comparison, the cost of maintaining large public buildings with huge amounts of publically accessible paper records, plus the staff to maintain them, is very high.
So, no, altogether, I don't see why access to public records over the Internet should cost any money. Even if such access is provided in addition to the physical locations, the incremental cost is tiny. And if such access is provided to replace some physical locations, we could save a lot of money. It is time for the US government to stop thinking of computerized access as a luxury and to start thinking of it as a way to make more public records available to more people at a lower cost.
Patent Information Users Group
IP Australia
US Patent & Trademark Office (UPSTO)
European Patent Office
for a few