Improve the USPTO? Not Necessary
December 11, 2009
Short honk: I love the USPTO and its Web 23.245 search system. If * you * find the USPTO in need of a change, navigate to this Slashdot post, click the Request for Comments link, and send in your ideas. The addled goose wants you to add a sentence that points out how wonderful the present search system is. There is no need to make the full US patent corpus searchable. That is what lawyers are for!
Stephen Arnold, December 11, 2009
I want to disclose to the USPTO that I was not paid to praise the search system at this institution. I love it from the tip of my beak to the bottom of my web feet.
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2 Responses to “Improve the USPTO? Not Necessary”
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Hi Stephen, I have a few thoughts on this, as it’s a topic close to my heart (I work for Intellogist.com, where we review patent search systems). There are people who have to spend all day, every day working with patents, and although the USPTO’s patent search system is a start, there are actually a lot of problems with it (the fact that it displays patent images in TIFF format that requires a special plug-in seems to be a problem for a lot of folks). Also, the USPTO has fallen far behind the European Patent Office, which produces esp@cenet. While it’s true that esp@cenet (http://ep.espacenet.com/) does not search full text, it does provide image drawing mosaics, gives you free PDF downloads, and best of all, provides free international patent family data and legal status data (and takes the collection of that extremely important data upon itself).
In addition, if you’re going to be performing serious prior art searching, you need lots of workflow support, like effective citation searching tools, saved search histories, saved results lists, etc. none of which the USPTO provides. Not that they necessarily have to take that upon themselves – but it’s worth noting.
Finally I think a lot of people would take issue with the idea that there’s no need to make the US patent corpus searchable – although I apologize if you were writing this post tongue-in-cheek and I missed it! Google Patents has done it to an extent but their collection is unreliable for a comprehensive search due to scanning/OCR errors.
Kristin,
Ah, my humor was too subtle. Not much I can do about that, I fear. Did you laugh at Mark Twain’s grandfather’s ram?
Stephen E. Arnold, December 11, 2009