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Patent Databases Complicate Life For Inventors
karvind writes "New Scientists is running a story about how the move to electronic record-keeping is making it harder to check if a device has already been invented. From the article: '.. even though most online patent archives are incomplete, parts of the paper-based collections that preceded them are being destroyed.' We ran a story earlier on how to fix U.S. patents. Maybe I can patent the wheel again."
They are being destroy cuz it cost too much too keep them. (Atleast that's the story I heard) It cost money to keep the storing those records (room, maintaince, security to look after the record, etc.) and if there are too many records, they would have to expand the area to keep up.
Online databases also make it much easier to find prior art. These days, patent examiners search worldwide patent databases, and also use Google. (I have filed patents, and have had prior-art cited against me that could only have been found by a Google search). So electronic databases usually make things better. Silly things still get through, of course, but imagine how much crap would get through without these massive patent databases.
Because electronically hosted history is much easier to rewrite (see George Orwell's 1984, conservative biggots and current US govt for "Why should I rewrite history on a regular basis")
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Not sure about other countries, but the USPTO has patent depository libraries scattered throughout the US. See here for details.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".