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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?