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

Re:Firspt Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Your first post violated 3 of my patents, prepare to get reamed.

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

[HadesInjustice]

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.

Re:Raises a simple question

[masklinn]

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")

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.

Law Suit

[HadesInjustice]

Does this mean that there will be a lot more funny patent rights law suits I can read about??? I generally found them quite interesting and really funny. Also, does that mean I can try to patent the "eletronic patending system" by calling it the "patend facilitation device" ??? lol

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.

Re:Brilliant idea.

[servoled]

Not sure about other countries, but the USPTO has patent depository libraries scattered throughout the US. See here for details.

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.

Re:I am worried

[bigpat]

"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."

Yes, but if it the government we are talking about, then it is very likely that the databases will be redundant and spread across several states and subcontractors. And forget millions of dollars, it will be billions of dollars before their done. Oh and by the time it is all finished it will be obsolete and we'll still use it for 30 years. Oh and regular folks won't be able to access it except through a terrible user interface that makes it impossible to search even though it would be easy to make it more usable, so that commercial companies will have to step in and provide "value added" services at additional cost. Then calls to make it more usable will be met with calls by congress not to interfere in the free market, ie compete with an artificial industry that the government created in the first place. Oh and then through a round of cost cutting it will be decided that having redundant and incompatible databases is a waste of resources...
Only then will the concern you raise be valid about putting all your eggs in one electronic basket. But I'd give it about 10 years, and a billion dollars or so.

Re:I am worried

[radu124]

public key signature works at least as good

imagine you sign some documents and then you make sure you loose the private key for good, the documents can still be checked using the public key, but nobody will be able to duplicate the signature on another document. Keys can be changed each few months.

I don't trust paper more than algorithms. Although you never know when they manage to break rsa. But that would be a global disaster and maybe patents will be the least concern.

Also note that you can store disks in a secure area, and also make radioactive marks on them so as to determine their age. Solutions can always be found, and maybe someone is getting some funding exactly for that.

May be

[Anonymous Coward]

"May be I can patent the wheel again."

May be you can al so pa tent inno vative spell ing meth od, who knows?

Re:Patents...

[archevis]

Yup, they'll come up with an easy method for checking patents.

And then they'll patent it...

Online patent databases

[Steve1952]

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.

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 ?

We should just burn them all and

[A beautiful mind]

erase the online storage

Those patent which have some idea can prove with a device, or physical object that they do, those who cannot provide such thing shouldn't be there in the first place.

I wish it would be this easy...

eBay old Patent Paperwork...

[rewinn]

If the issue is money, why aren't we eBaying old patent paperwork instead of pulping it?

If the International Star Registry can get $49.99 for "Naming A Star" ... how very likely is it that the Patent Office could get as much that for GENUINE old patent paper? Surely some of the more interesting patents would get big bucks and/or donated to museums.

While this is not as good as professional preservation of historical documents, since preservation is not in the cards, at least eBaying would preserve most of the originals, admittedly in a hap-hazard fashion.

Computerized database storage means...

[OwenMarshall]

... some read/write medium that can be accessed many times.

Hard disks. Lots of hard disks.

Want to solve the patent problem right away? Everyone converge on the Patent and Trademark office. Bring magnets.

Big magnets.

New Scientists?

[matt me]

Are we referring to the popular science and technology weekly, New Scientist, or to a collective of magazines - the New Einstein, the New Newton and the New Bohr?

Surely no-one here on Slashes' Dot would make such a mistake.

Uh oh...

[civman2]

I think is is in violation of a patent I filed regarding "An electronic method to store and search documents detailing grants made by a government that confer upon the creators of inventions the sole right to make, use, and sell those inventions for a set period of time"

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.

I welcome this

[houghi]

Patent, what patent? The computer tells us that you don't have a patent. I even think your company does not exist anywhere in the patent office, could you please tell me your companyname?
"Microsoft"

Clicke-ty-click. Nope, sorry, not one patent.

Remember, some geek has to maintain that database, all we need is to get a BOFH in there.

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?