The USPTO says it doesn’t have the technical capability to provide the information in a bulk machine readable format, and that the arrangement is to serve as a bridge as the USPTO develops an acquisition strategy for this.

"The USPTO is committed to providing increased transparency as called for by the President’s Open Government Initiative.  An important element of that transparency is making valuable public patent and trademark information more widely available in a bulk form so companies and researchers can download it for analysis and research," said Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the USPTO, David Kappos.  "Because the USPTO does not currently have the technical capability to offer the data in bulk form from our own Web site, we have teamed with Google to provide the data in a way that is convenient and at no cost for those who desire it."

"We’re happy to work with the USPTO to make patent and trademark data more accessible and useful," said Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager for Google. "It’s important to make public data easier to gather and analyze. And when the data is free, that’s even better."

The USPTO’s public data in bulk form has only been available as a fee-based service until this point. The agency says about ten terabytes will be made available. This will include patent grants, published applications, trademark applications, Trademark Trial and Appeal Board proceedings, patent classification info, patent maintenance fee events, and patent/trademark assignments.

The partnership is a no-cost two year agreement. The information will be free to the public as well.

Currently, Google already has a Patent search service in beta, which lets users search over 7 million patents.

Google climbed past a morass of ineffective search engines when it arrived on the Internet. Its devotion to the most relevant possible solution for a given query quickly made it the de facto search choice as millions of people shifted their browsing habits from walled garden content to the broader World Wide Web.

The essential and much-discussed PageRank technology holds a patent, a common legal protection sought by software developers small and large. Some have claimed software patents affect far too broad a scope of potential innovation, leading to lawsuits where a patent owner claims damages by multiple companies.

Those on the losing end of such suits end up paying for what they argue are obvious and non-original concepts. That could change with a shift in the way the USPTO looks at software patents, the Patently-O blog on patent law said.

A series of cases may remake the software industry, all the way to the top where Google and other companies reside:

In the most recent of these three (cases)—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they "result in a physical transformation of an article" or are "tied to a particular machine."

Patently-O sees Google’s PageRank, the patent for which is owned by Stanford University, as failing the first part of the test, as generating scores isn’t a physical transformation. The second part proves troubling given recent decisions made by the USPTO in a couple of other cases, not only for PageRank but other Google patents too.

"Google might have thought that the patent system would surely protect new technological developments that are highly creative and socially valuable. The PTO’s new position proves that view mistaken," Patently-O said.

The USPTO is not, however, that keen on P2P.

The Washington Post reports that the pilot program to start this spring is actually quite Wikipedia-esque with Digg.com-ian highlights (Seriously, you can make up any kind of word you like in this digirevolution). The community will be able to score "the most respected comments," pushing them to the top of the application.

"For the first time in history, it allows the patent-office examiners to open up their cubicles and get access to a whole world of technical experts," WaPo quotes IBM’s David J. Kappos as saying.

A big part of the reason for webtwopointohifying the patent application process is the sheer number of applications being filed these days. The USPTO’s 4,000 examiners stacked up 332,000 applications last year. And they’re just sick of it.

It won’t be an automatic process. Companies or parties submitting applications have to agree to let the Internet review the applications. But anonymity is not allowed in this process, names and credentials are required for commenting, and experts will be rated according to a kind of reputation system. Microsoft, Intel, HP, and Oracle all will add their applications to the initial 250 in the pile.

While this is a major step forward into the 21st Century for the government agency, they don’t want you to think all forms of this new digitized promiscuity are acceptable. In fact, some are still quite the abomination. Take peer-to-peer, for example, which by its very nomenclature sounds like a venereal contagion tragedy waiting to happen.

 “Computer programs that can cause unintended filesharing contribute to copyright infringement, and they threaten the security of personal, corporate, and governmental data,” said Jon Dudas, under secretary of commerce for intellectual property—the Bush Administration’s point person on copyright policy.

In fact, p2p goes beyond the penicillin-cured scourges afflicting copyright holders. It’s become a matter of national security. A new report singles out KaZaA, LimeWire, BearShare, eDonkey and Morpheus as file-sharing programs that could cause unintentional leakage of files.

The USPTO’s biggest concern is sensitive government data. The report is said to show that inadvertent sharing has had severe consequences for governments. “There are documented incidents of P2P file sharing where Department of Defense sensitive documents have been found on non-US computers with no protection against hostile intelligence,” it reads.

“A decade ago, no one would have thought that copyright infringement could threaten personal or national security,” said Dudas. “Today, that threat is a reality; we need to understand its causes and find solutions.”

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How can you do a free patent search to find out if your invention can be patented?

Some of the most popular free patent databases in the world are http://www.uspto.gov, http://ep.espacenet.org, http://www.wipo.int and http://www.surfip.gov.sg.

We will briefly discuss in this article how you can conduct a Free Patent Search in USPTO database. This is the first of the seven articles that we will write to teach any one to use USPTO website to conduct patent search.

USPTO database contains over 33 million patent documents and is updated every week. The website is probably the largest patent website in the world. It provides a free patent search facility for both beginners and advanced users.

How can I conduct a Patent Search at USPTO?

The answer to this question is given in a technical way in many websites. We will try to avoid the jargon and we will try to enable even a layperson that is not exposed to search databases regularly to do it easily.

The USPTO deals with conducting a Patent Search using its freely searchable patent database through the Internet. The instructions are given at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/ptdl/step7.htm The USPTO stresses the importance on 7 Steps each one to be done one after the other.

The Patent Search website Tmpsearchers.com has started a patent training course online. We can train you online wherever you live and the lessons and exercises are sent on a daily basis for three weeks. We teach a simplified version of methods to our students using Free Patent Databases. Although a paid database is more users friendly, the official free databases are updated with regular data and the expensive paid databases take some time (a short time) to update themselves to be current. Therefore it is necessary to conduct a search in the official free patent databases online even after using paid patent databases. A proper training and search strategy for free databases is therefore very important.

One problem is that the USPTO does not allow you to do the free patent search on patents granted prior to 1976 unless you start the patent search with the class and sub class alone. So you need to identify the classes and then do a patent research of pre 1976 patents also.

Our method slightly differs from the methodology advised by USPTO and consists of 9 Steps.

1. Start the search with some relevant keywords

When you do a search using USPTO you will go to the search inter-face at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html Start with the issued patents and start with using some keywords, which are relevant to your invention. You may use either the quick search method or the advanced search method. Be sure to study the help pages at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/help/help.htm and especially the page at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/help/helpadv.htm if you are going to use the advanced search method.

2. You will get some results and by using more relevant keywords you can reduce the number of patent titles to a minimum of about 40. Please keep a record of all the keywords that you used.

3. Please note all the classifications of cited in these patents. Note both the US Classification and the International Classification of Patents. This is a must.

4. Repeat the patent search with the Published Applications using http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html Again record the search queries and the classifications.

5. Now study the classifications that are repeated time and again in your results and try to narrow down the invention to some particular classifications. It is not very difficult to do although it will take some time.

You may learn the other four steps by in our patent training web page.

These steps should give you a very comprehensive picture of the free patent search that can be done at USPTO.

A similar strategy can be followed at other free patent databases online using the International classifications that you have identified.

Working at the Free Patent Search website Tmpsearchers.com we find that we are able to find patents easily when we do patent search this way, but the key here is to master the keywords to be applied to conduct the patent search. If you want to know more or learn other advanced techniques of patent search using the free patent search interface of USPTO patent database, please contact us for any help needed.

Ramaswami a Patent and Trademarks Attorney in India
provides free counseling in Patents and trademarks in
India. Know more about the services you can ask for at

http://www.tmpsearchers.com/contact.asp

There’s somethin’ happenin’ here
And what it is ain’t exactly clear…

Buffalo Springfield recorded ‘For What It’s Worth’ about 40 years ago. In 2001, Apple filed for a trademark on the term “iPod” and partially described it as “Portable and handheld digital electronic devices for recording, organizing, transmitting, manipulating, and reviewing text, data, and audio files;”.

Engadget points out that Apple has submitted a revised description back in June, with something new in Goods and Services: “handheld digital electronic devices for recording, organizing, transmitting, manipulating, and reviewing text, data, audio, image, and video files;”

(The USPTO site doesn’t offer a permalink to trademark searches. Go to the site, click on Search under Trademarks, search on “iPod”, and look at serial numbers 78653661 and 78089144.)

So what are a couple of extra words worth? Possibly a new iPod before the holidays, capable of supporting video, available for convenient download from the iTunes Music Store. Or perhaps Media Store instead?

Video for the small screen can work. Nintendo was stuffing Johnny Bravo into cartridges for the GameBoy Advance well before Sony dropped the PSP on the crowd, along with its UMD-format movies (available separately, see store for details.)

Apple’s engineers definitely have the smarts to make it work. And Steve Jobs has a new friend in Disney top-man Robert Iger, who certainly could have the studio people scrape together some content to help spur interest.

Like other tech companies, Apple has to get something new to market at intervals to maintain its revenue stream. Sales of the iPod have begun to flatten; Apple pays at least 70 cents of every single it sells on iTunes to a music label, probably more to the major players, and that’s out of 99 cents.

Apple recently sold its 500 millionth song. That’s $495 million at 99 cents each; knock off 70 cents per, and the figure comes down to $145 million leftover for the tea kitty in Cupertino. Another digital media revenue stream would certainly help, especially if Apple can get better terms.

That path may be lit with the glow of a million video iPods under Christmas trees in 2005.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.