Slashdot Mirror
US Patent Office Teams With Google On Database
PatPending writes "The Patent and Trademark Office announced it has reached a two-year 'no-cost' agreement with Google to make patent and trademark data electronically available and free to the public. From the article: 'Saying it lacks the technical capacity to offer such a service, PTO said the two-year agreement with Google is a temporary solution while the agency seeks a contractor to build a database that would allow the public to access such information in electronic machine-readable bulk form.'"
...that technically developing their own system would infringe on too many patents.
Its kind of impossible to circumvent a conflict of interest here.
If I was Google I'd do it for free as well. The data they'll be a privy too, whilst 'creating' the system would be invaluable.
Sounds like win win situation.
Make it impossible.
Hopefully the patent examiners will check it themselves before approving applications.
It's funny, but it's true.
What will happen if someone tries to troll the patent office once this final contractor job is done? I could see someone sticking the patent office with an "on the web" suit if this thing is supposed to be accessible to the public.
Maybe, then, we'll get some real reform.
what part of making it available to the public/world is some magic google advantage?
The idea here is that it will be open for everyone.
your argument here is pathetic.
the two-year agreement with Google is a temporary solution while the agency seeks a contractor to build a database that would allow the public to access such information in electronic machine-readable bulk form
And what role is Google serving if they spend two years hosting the patents in their database while the USPTO spends 24 months looking for a contractor who will presumably charge money to do the same thing?
Why not have Google spend two-years building the interface with a plan to turn control of it over to USPTO employees in 2012? It seems like by then the USPTO could have gained the technical skills necessary to administer their database instead of turning to keys over to some different 3rd party contractor.
No?
I don't understand why they would bother seeking to farm this out to a different contractor, just allow Google to do the entire thing and tack a nice link on to their main search engine website that everyone can access. I mean honestly, Google does this thing best, no need to complicate things with yet another overly-long and costly-to-the-taxpayer bidding/contract process.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Patents should be freely available to the public. When you patent an idea it goes into the public domain and you can stop keeping it a secret in your garden shed.
The current system where patent searches are slow beurocratic rambles through paper files is mad. It makes patent lawyers one of the most highly paid proffessions, as they know how to navigate the system.
This is a big step forward and I applaud google for doing this.
"The idea here is that it will be open for everyone." is interesting thinking back to the indexing paywalls of "free' public data loved by many firms.
The magic google advantage is depth and spread. Gone are the regional and state and single topic databases.
What might be offered to consumers for free, could be packaged in with vast amounts other data for paying customers eg government agencies or their private sector partners.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You don't understand how government IT works these days.
Most government IT shops in the U.S. have not yet recovered from the election of Bush the Younger. When he came into office, the overall attitude of the new guys in charge was that they hated government, hated government workers, and believed that it was a God-given truth that all government workers are incompetent at all things they do. Thus, anything that could be contracted out must be contracted out. Internal IT got downsized, outsourced, demoralized, broken, and spat on in many, many places.
Just as an aside, this idiocy reached such insane heights that high-level executives at one government agency actually floated a plan to do away with internal local IT support and replace it, where feasible, with something called "depot maintenance." Reduced to nuts and bolts, they actually considered contracting with Best Buy for certain instances of in-the-field deskside support! This made perfect sense to the bigwigs. After all, Best Buy is private industry so they must be more competent than anyone who actually works for the agency, right?
That attitude crippled many agencies and most have yet to recover. Even if Google built the system and handed it over with a ribbon around it, it's likely that the executives at USPTO would go looking for a contractor to charge lots of money to run the thing. (Disclaimer: I'm not there; I'm just speaking from broad experience with multiple agencies. I hope somone from USPTO will chime in.)
It's just part of the culture. I know it seems bad, but eventually people will wake up to the fact that if you keep electing people who believe that all government is bad, the result is going to be...well...bad government. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, doncha know.
THey should instead create a master DB that allows easy entry for themselves and for search engines to browse it easily. Then open up any and ALL search engines, with the proviso that all information will made available to all (IOW, for any search engine that limits it to a certain population, say, "You must use our browser or our platform"). If the search engine makes it limited to a single platform, say Bing decides to carry it and limits it to MSIE, or makes it sux for anything except for WIndows, then they are denied the data. Finally, if this approach does not work, then USPTO should undertake creation of a search engine.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...USPTO should release all raw data and metadata for public consumption. If Google or anyone else want to build a frontend to it, let them do so.
Please get over your hate.
I was a federal IT employee during the time when all this outsourcing got going, there should still be paperwork with my signature contracting out jobs, I read all the paperwork on doing it and everything else and it start and was organized by ex-President Clinton. All the studies, reports, and decisions continued in the Bush administration came from Clinton.
The main reason Clinton gave for outsourcing everything had the main points of being cheaper, being able to get the job done(not able to hire enough federal employees and flexibility of not being locked in with the federal employees and the loss of new skills that gave.
Now all this new insourcing the reports and analysis they are using are all coming from studies ordered during the Bush administration, except they are ignoring the warning given in the reports and just told people to insource. This is now leading to people building up empires and it is now costing more then the proposed cost saving. You did have President Bush allowing more experimentation to see if some positions would save money and generate similar results some worked out and others were failures and insourced.
It will be an advantageous position if google can examine the good ideas that people search on that patents don't exist for yet. That is if they maintain an interest in the software.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I have lots of reasons to hate Bush and the problems that hit my agency while he was Prez are, actually, fairly low on that list. He screwed up lots of other things, too. And "hate" is too strong a word, implying a personal animosity that doesn't exist in this case. I just think he was a lousy president.
As for it all starting under Clinton, I'll take your word for it. After Clinton personally (I repeat: *personally*) killed a project I was peripherally involved with, I never had much use for the guy. You know you've pissed off someone up high when an executive in your agency walks into the group, calls everybody into a meeting, tells everybody to cease all work without even returning pending phone calls, and orders that all records be shredded starting the instant the meeting ends. :-)
So if you say Clinton started it, I'll go along with that. You must admit, though, that the process accelerated and the attitude toward government employees truly went into the crapper under Bush, right?
Maybe, then, we'll get some real reform.
That's the only thing that will stop it from happening.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
Of COURSE they want to use Google. The new "I'm just like Bing" wallpaper that Google is using to make search results unreadable plays right into the hands of those who depend on the current patent mess.
Just let the PTO plop the patents onto a set of web-pages, Google, Bing et al. will find them.
You can't patent the way you drive your car. So why can you patent instructions to a computer?
Patent the device. Not how you use it.
If you want to write a book about your driving method, you would get a copyright. Same applies to software.
Software and business method patents need to go away.
So if you say Clinton started it, I'll go along with that. You must admit, though, that the process accelerated and the attitude toward government employees truly went into the crapper under Bush, right?
It existed before and not really has changed. Take for instance the job I currently work, when I came in as a contractor there were 4 people working it, myself and 3 federal employees, over the last couple of years those people were moved to other duties and what was done increase, no problem I have a long list of things to do but generally get them everything done in time.
I was recently insourced as part of President obamas insource everyone so we can save $41,000 per person(this was based on reports ordered by President Bush but did not apply to this blanket insourcing) and they are now in the processes of having what I was doing done by 6 federal employees, myself and 5 others and some of the work I was doing is going away.
If that is not a poor attitude on what can be done by federal employees then what is?
They really need to hit these pay-wall for public information businesses hard. I am tired of paying Thompson-West $250/Month for access to cases that my own tax dollars paid for. If they can monetize the process with advertising, the government can get a cut, and the whole process could end up actually saving tax payers money. Maybe the PTO can hire a few more people.
Bet you didn't know this. As I've posted, I just spent a few years at lovely (cough) FCI Elkton in Ohio. As with most BOP facilities, Elkton has a UNICOR "factory" where inmates work for up to $1 per hour, (though most make much, much less) to turn out furniture (Living in a dorm? It's probably got UNICOR furniture), mattresses, fencing, various types of wire, signs, lockers, filters, even prescription eyewear. And they also make guided missile components, batteries, injection molds, even power transformers and equipment. Wanna see a list?
And of course, they can compete with real companies, at insanely low prices because of near-slave labor. Nike has nothing on UNICOR.
But wait! There's more! Yes, UNICOR will handle all your sensitive documents and assign hundreds of barely trained drooling inmates (anyone with computer skills is banned from the work, as you would expect from the Government. I worked there for two weeks till they found out I had skills and banned me from the factory.) to take your paper documents (like Patent applications), use 1980's scanners and then get inmates to "fix" the scans manually on cutting edge Pentium 4 computers, discarded as "e-waste" by the US Government.
Need OCR/Coding/Indexing? No other company can touch our prices. And sure! You can trust our Luddite sex offenders not to talk about the contents of your patent to, say, a competitor.
Oh, the XML? They sub that out, since no Federal inmate is allowed by statute to write even markup code.
Or, maybe you have tons of sensitive paper documents that need electronic imaging? We will hand your precious records to our cadre of drug dealers (remember, if they've so much as written an email, they are forbidden! Only the very worst and stupidest for us!) and let them copy each one by hand. They won't take any. Really. Nope.
So! You can trust the USPTO with your work of a lifetime, they'll take care of it and secure it with all the power of the US Government.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
wha?
how could a company not index google's data? It's not like it's hidden. Google even lets people search within PDFs and things that don't explicitly have text data.
This sounds less like a paywall and a lot more like "here's a book. go read it"
I should add, since when was data for paying customers ever free? "free for personal use, pay for corporate use" has been the motto of most licenses/software for significantly more years than it should be.
Yes, the Clinton administration did bring a push for an overhaul to inefficient government. The entire program was to be led by his Vice President and it was. And they accomplished setting the program into motion but as with any government program things take time and the whole idea fit well with the Republican base which is why much of it was continued, although not all and not under the same name--which is why some people are confused.
In the end this is just another level in the on-going and fruitless battle that the political branch has with the administrative and one which will never be solved.
You make a good point. I've seen several situation like you describe, as well as variations thereof.
Anecdote: A friend of mine retired a while back. He was incredibly stressed and overworked. He was extremely competent and hardworking, but the crushing workload eventually wore him out. He'd been asking for help for years.
He was a GS 11. When he retired, management put a new person in the job, tried that for a while, then re-assessed the situation. When all was said and done, that single GS 11 employee was eventually replaced by two GS 12s and three GS 7s.
My point? In government service, like anywhere else, sometimes it doesn't pay to be as good as you can be. You'll just get worked to death by an uncaring management that displays (as in your situation) a lamentable set of attitudes toward their own people. Even so, there are good and lousy employees in every organization and making assumptions about the competence of people based on whether they work in the public or private sector is never smart. You just can't tell.
The best solution is graceful failure.
Elements include
* every positive attitude
* identify critical vs non-critical
* fail to meet deadlines
* do quality work otherwise
Management is blind to your true capability- they will walk you over a cliff. They are taught until things start failing, the staff isn't really at capacity yet. And that's true. It's the only real way to know. People bitch and complain and then go back to browsing and posting on slashdot.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"here's a patent. go read it" dont mind the long term cookie, ads?
The interest in any one or sets patent getting more reads than the 'average' of others could be useful too.
Trends start to form, think of the logged search data before and after after you register a patent.
Thats a lot of unique long term marketing and predictive power linked back to a unique person.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If I understand correctly, the "monopoly" aspect of patent restrictions don't apply to the government. The government can use any patented invention without restriction, but the patent holder is entitled to claim compensation from the government. So there may be some truth to your witty observation, due to cost of compensation.
Related, note that often government contractors may be immune to patent infringement claims.
yes, clickstream data, etc. Remind me again what does this have to do with other people being able to harness the patent information itself, which was the purpose?
google already owns the search share, whether you open a patent link or not they already know what you are searching for. It's not exactly a whole lot of extra information.
Now your concept of using that data to determine patents, etc? What makes you think google even cares? It's the courts that matter. If they really need something invalidated they'll just fight it tooth and nail in court, or just wait for the court system to determine, such as bilski.
The rest of what you are saying is so off the grid that I can't find it at all even remotely logical. You're seriously stretching logic on this in ways that do not seem based on anything. You can search for patents on bing too! oh no! what will we do! /sheesh.
The USPTO has had their patent files on line for years. They're at the USPTO site. There's a reasonable search engine. Not only are the patents themselves there, but the whole "file wrapper" history information is available. However, it's rate limited to about 1000 patents per day per user.
What Google is doing, apparently, is making the entire database available for bulk download. The USPTO sells that database, and the other patent-indexing services buy it. But you have to get it on Digital Linear Tapes (DLT) and it costs several thousand dollars, because of the size of the data set. Google is apparently willing to put that data out for full download in exchange for getting their copy for free. And the USPTO gets out of the tape copying business.
Excellent points.
I've had extensive "quality improvement process" training. The best lessons I've learned concern "facilitating failure." Unfortunately, until something fails, it doesn't get fixed.
I have to occasionally remind myself of that.
In related news, Jeff Bezos has just submitted a patent application to do this bulk download in 1-Click or 1-Nod.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
You don't understand how government IT works these days.
Most government IT shops in the U.S. have not yet recovered from the election of Bush the Younger. When he came into office, [cut for sanity]
Right, it's all Bush's fault. Just like everything else.
One question is: will Google record (and post-process) search strings and the ip addresses associated with them? Or will searches be anonymous?
If the former, there is (potentially) great value in knowing that (for example) Microsoft is searching for prior art related to "concurrent interactive television for network connected devices"
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
This could be quite a valuable resource. I continue to be impressed by the actions of USPTO Director David Kappos, who actually seems to understand that providing greater accessibility and services to the public may, in turn, contribute to increased efficiency and improved good will for the USPTO -- and for patent law itself. The only thing about this that gives me pause is Google's involvement. Ever since I learned that they've enlisted the help of the NSA in their operations, I'm a little wary of any measures that could give them even greater power over data. Add to that their recent legal troubles stemming from the "accidental" collection of WiFi information. But at least in this case, Google is disseminating information, rather than collecting it ... one hopes.