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."

Comments

Raises a simple question

[Overly Critical Guy]

If the online databases are incomplete, why are the paper-based archives being destroyed? Mismanagement? The article doesn't get into the details, so I'm left to ponder the stupidity of it.

Re:Raises a simple question

[powerlord]

They are being destroy cuz it cost too much too keep them.

Are we talking about the same patent office that makes money on every patent granted? Now suddenly that money is not enough to actually keep a f*cking record of that!?

Yeah, because the Board of Directors (read Congress) decided that the patent office is a cost center, and that the money it generates could be much better put to use in something else. Kinda like Google deciding that it should invest most of its money in something rather than Search Engine technology, Hardware and Bandwidth, and suddenly deciding to throw away links older than a few years, because they were running out of Hard Drive space. Bright people to canabalize their core buisness, but with the Patent Office, one has no choice since they are a Monopoly.

(Poor analogy but the best one I could come up with)

Re:Raises a simple question

[ecloud]

If the government were remade from the ground up, it would probably be much more socialistic and would not protect our basic freedoms as well as the current one does. IMO America is what it is primarily due to being a fresh young country without a lot of baggage, and because the founders had the joltingly uncluttered perspective of having themselves fought in the revolution, and remembered very well what they wanted to be free from. Nowadays the majority thinks that a good job and cheap gas and social security and health insurance are all basic rights.

What we need is to somehow toss out the bureacracies, and pare the corpus of laws down to the essentials, the way they once were simple, without changing the fundamental structure; but that is not very easy.

Brilliant idea.

[Teddy Beartuzzi]

Maybe they should burn the Declaration of Independence while they're at it, after all, I saw a copy online somewhere.

Re:Brilliant idea.

[John Seminal]

Maybe they should burn the Declaration of Independence while they're at it, after all, I saw a copy online somewhere.

That is what I dislike, the idea of burning the original documents. Why not let some university house the original documents. There is a ton of cheap labor (students). I know my university was a federal depository, we had a whole floor on the library that was filled with federal court cases on paper, along with other legislation.

I am worried

[John Seminal]

This move from paper to computer records is troubling for me. I don't think I would be as worried if they also kept a paper record as well, but moving everything to a database could mean big trouble. Large companies, with IT budgets in the millions of dollars range have had computer problems, lost data, and have had hackers gain access to restricted areas. Paper offers more security. Unless someone can burn the documents, something will exsist. With a database, all you have is a computer record. Call me old fashioned, but I want important records on paper.

It is like a library. If one day we decide to move all our books to electronic formats, who is to say a tyrant one day can't remove or change items, slowly, so that nobody notices. Maybe I am 1984-ish paranoid, but I want it on paper.

Re:I am worried

[John Seminal]

And paper cannot be changed??

It would be much harder to change a paper record. First, you would have to get inside the building it is housed in. Second, with some of the older documents, you would have to match the type face. And you would have to match the ink. And you would have to make it look like it aged right. And there are finger prints on the original documents. There are more ways to verify that a paper document is an original than a computer record.

So what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

if a massive sun ejection of magnetic field bathed the earth with a high magnetic dose, we would be ok but would we lose all of mankinds knowledge ?
digital data storage so far has proved itself to be unreliable (cd rot,hard drives failing after 1-3yr etc etc)
yet we want to depend even more on it ?
you have to laugh at the stupidity and short sightedness of humans at times, can you imagine if Da Vinci or Einstein or even the Wright brothers had encrypted their stuff with 4096bit 1 time pad or quantum encryption

or do we always have to put our hands in the fire to find out its hot ?

Heh!

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

Considering some of the patents they let through, if I was an inventor the moment I came up with any idea remotely good I would patent it immediately and see what happens..

Think they'll actually read it/research it back?

Remember guys.. 1-click shopping... i patented 'a method for the self-induction of pleasure' and am about to make bank..

Delphion

[tezza]

I've used Delpion now for a while. It replaced IBM's Patent search I believe.

It is good.

There is a function where you can collect lists of patents, and do Set Unions, Intersections, Subtractions and the like.
My latest patent application is in the fields of crowd control, crowd safety. That was 3000 items that matched those terms. I could go through and sort out the misses.
You could have a little thumbnail, as this was invaluable, as you can tell from the diagram often that it is a dissimilar device, or that the patent referrs to some way of joining/constructing such a thing.

Web based Delphion is not perfect though. Nor any large web list checking application without powerful list management functions.

I would dearly have liked a capability to colour the table cells that you had visited. Viewing 25 by 25 of the resultset was too confusing. But if you chose to display 500 at a time, then you tend to also loose track.

But now salvation is at hand. Using Firefox, Greasemonkey and some hand written tailored javascript allows me to do exactly this.

I meant to add as well, if the lifetime of a patent is 25 years tops, surely they only really have to be kept for that long? Then prior art and commercialised products could cover the basis for it having been in the Public Domain previously.

Re:Some not-so-big drops

[HiThere]

It can't descend into a farce, it's already there. I suppose it could get worse, but I don't have a name for it. Grummet, perhaps, or SNAFU. Unfortunately those have the wrong connotation, of everything grinding to a halt, where in the case of the patent office it just allows ANYTHING to get patented. Including duplicates. It's already pretty close, though, and this is merely another minor turn. (Standard patent language is sufficiently obscure that there have already been duplicate patents issued on the same invention described differently. Perhaps this will become common. [I wonder, will the holders be forced to pay each other royalties?])

The problem with patents

[CastrTroy]

The problem with patents is that it's impossible to know if you are violating one. With paper copies, it's impossible to look through them all to make sure your technology is not patent infringing. Even electronic means which are much easier to search cannot garauntee that you are not infringing. What really makes me mad, is when companies sue other companies for violating patents, years after they have come out with a product. They really should have a limited time to sue a company. This way they can't be choosy, by only choosing products they can get lots of money from.

Re:Microfilm . . .and

[some guy I know]

how do the corporations and other patent owners feel about having their proof destroyed.

What's even more important, from the standpoint of the rest of us, is proof that various patents have expired.
Without such proof, what is to prevent a person or corporation from trying to patent something that has been patented long in the past?