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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.
Make it impossible.
Hopefully the patent examiners will check it themselves before approving applications.
The data they'll be a privy too, whilst 'creating' the system would be invaluable.
Just out of curiosity, what "data" will they be privy to that isn't already supposed to be available to everyone? Google already serves up individual patents. That means they already have the patent information. I assume this would just mean that the USPTO would serve them up applications faster? Or more efficiently? (instead of Google's usual technology of go find it and index it) And then allow for bulk downloads. I've used the USPTO search "engine" many times to reference patents in Slashdot stories and it's horrid compared to Google.
... well ... funny. I mean, I think there are other private search sites like Thomsom West that charge you per hour to use their search engine to crawl their indexes of laws and court cases that should be public data in the first place. I wouldn't go complaining about Google making the patent process more transparent and searchable if I were you ...
Really to think that Google's getting anything out of this is kind of
In my opinion, this is a very good development.
My work here is dung.
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.
Certainly could be good for Google if all of Microsoft's patents somehow end up showing up as Google patents :p
which is totally what she 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
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.
What?
"A patent (pronounced /pætnt/ or /petnt/) is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state (national government) to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a public disclosure of an invention."
How is access to already public information invaluable?
I can see a small advantage in being able to search it with better algoritms though.
But it's all public information - google would just make it more accessible. How would they benefit from it ?
Really to think that Google's getting anything out of this is kind of ... well ... funny.
They're getting good PR from it. I say "Yay, Google!"
Free Martian Whores!
Welp, firstly you said was complaining no I didn't complain I was saying "If I was Google I'd do it".
Second, your telling me that there is nothing confidential about USPTO? Right, okay .... Next please!
Gee i donno, a big fucken database given to a big fucken advertising firm ...
"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"
Welp, firstly you said was complaining no I didn't complain I was saying "If I was Google I'd do it".
From the definition of Conflict of Interest: "A conflict of interest (COI) occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other." I would assume that by titling your post as "Conflict of Interest" and also saying that there is no way to circumvent it, you were complaining of corruption between Google and the United States Patent Office. Was I incorrect in my assumption?
Second, your telling me that there is nothing confidential about USPTO? Right, okay .... Next please!
Although parts of the process remain confidential, I question why any of it needs to be confidential. The material patented is confidential as the entity submitting it sees fit until they apply for it. Once the application has been submitted, then it's public. Hence the phrase "patent pending" to remind everyone that their invention is in process to become their intellectual property. A patent examiner employed by the federal government then gets the patent and reviews it for errors. They do some undetermined amount of research for prior art or related patents. This is confidential only because it's too laborious to publicize. As revisions are made, those are public too. Really the only confidential part is what the hell is going on inside the examiner's mind. And sometimes (like the Amazon 1-click), everyone would benefit from any sort of logic outlined by the examiner. Once it's approved, you better believe it's public and nothing should be confidential. Especially if you're about to get your ass sued over a patent ... how could anything related to that patent be held confidential and then be used against you in court?
You know, for a while the USPTO was seriously considering a wiki -- maybe even a community wiki -- where people could review new patents and discuss them with links to other patents and potential prior art. The problems with this idea is only that those making the comments would most likely not have the patent law expertise and it would amount to a landslide of opinions rather than real claims.
Transparency and publication of the entire patent process -- to the best of the USPTO's ability -- provides accountability and reliability to those of us who both benefit and suffer from patents. Trust me, you're barking up the wrong tree here and I'm at a loss for words to respond to your attitude of "next please!"
My work here is dung.
They're getting a public more empowered to see the ludicrous situation the PTO is in lately and to challenge silly patents which never should have been granted. As Google writes much software and software patents tend to be easily gained and broadly protected (think MPEG-LA and H.264) that can only be a good thing for them as well as everyone else who isn't a patent troll.
The same way they profit from all the other websites they offer free of charge...by slapping some of their ads on?
Hmm...context-sensitive ads in a search engine for patents...I see potential for giggles.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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.
Okay, here it is, I've never worked for UPSTO so I can't be 100% certain but I have worked for government organizations and understand the concept of process.
Public information is the result. I.E Patent Pending, approved, rejected, whatever ... That's the result.
Business names are public domain, Trademarks a public domain. Does that mean we see the 10 page application form leading up to the "resulted" public domain information or as the public do we simply get to the see the cliff notes?
Google has basically put their hand up to CRM a massive database of very valuable information, which goes beyond the scope of what the public will see. To think otherwise is plain nieve.
I might add, Google is also getting direct access to this "public domain" data.
The "public" gets single keyword query access to it.
That alone demonstrates a conflict of interest because it enables Google to draw analytical data from the database that noone else in the world could possibly generate (except for maybe UPSTO)
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.
A big database of already public information. Balance the cost of them writing something to go crawl and index this info against the cost of setting up and maintaining it and I'd hardly say they're gaining a massive benefit from this. Do you think they're going to somehow be able to use this information to somehow serve more appropriate adverts to inventors? Or that people paying for ads will somehow care that they're offering a free, short term database facility to a public body?
...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.
Google gains access to who is searching for which patents, and the search terms they use to do so. And the searches which show no matches are potentially much more interesting than those that give many results. I bet it would be fascinating reading to know which patents other companies are searching for, especially those not currently part of their core business.
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.
LOL; First, you make a lot of assumptions. I am sure that there is an internal DB for USPTO to use, but I seriously doubt that it will be made available to Google. To even assume so, well, that is not naive, just plain stupid.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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?
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.
Gee i donno, a big fucken database given to a big fucken advertising firm ...
How about you skip the handwaving and answer the fucken(sp) question
Or are you just about spreading FUD today?
Probably the extra data will be the patent file wrappers. That's where all the good stuff is when you're trying to challenge a patent or defend against a patent lawsuit. Speaking from experience, the wrapper can be orders of magnitude larger than the patent itself. Generally, the wrapper is not readily available. You have to pay a $200 fee to get a copy of it, more if it's over 400 pages.
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.
At the very least, it should be much simpler to search through existing patents/trademarks and avoid the legal landmines as well as find prior art more efficiently when applying for/challenging a patent/trademark.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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)
The data they'll be a privy too, whilst 'creating' the system would be invaluable.
Just out of curiosity, what "data" will they be privy to that isn't already supposed to be available to everyone?
Analytics. There's probably a lot of potential intelligence to be gleaned since, according to the article, Google will actually be hosting the site.
I hope they steer clear of that, but if they collect too much data it could open up quite a few cans of worms. "Oh hey, Microsoft's legal department has been searching for ____ patents lately and keeps going back to these patent numbers."
Really to think that Google's getting anything out of this is kind of ... well ... funny. I mean, I think there are other private search sites like Thomsom West that charge you per hour to use their search engine to crawl their indexes of laws and court cases that should be public data in the first place. I wouldn't go complaining about Google making the patent process more transparent and searchable if I were you ...
I'd rather see Google develop the code, database, application, whatever else needs to be done, and have it hosted on PTO servers. That said, I agree that I'd rather have Google doing this than any of the legal databases.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling