What's Your Poison?

Actor Dan Ackroyd's latest venture into the wine/spirits market has run afoul of Ontario bureaucrats. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) has refused to sell Ackroyd's Crystal Head brand vodka at its retail stores because it comes in a skull-shaped bottle.

The beer, wine and spirits industry is highly competitive, so many companies try to obtain maximum IP protection for their products. This includes protecting the shape or design of containers. Akroyd's company has filed US trademark applications (see 77967530) for the shape of the container and has also successfully applied for design patent protection: US D589,360 S was issued on March 31, 2009.

The skull motiff has been the subject of several US design patents, and has its very own classification in the USPC, D9/626. The earliest patent in this subclass was issued in 1890 (D20,135) for the design of a bottle shaped like a casket with the word "poison" and a skull emblazoned on the front. In fact, many of the early patents in this subclass are for bottles for poison. Images associated with death or the supernatural are a little more hip today, and recently issued patents are clearly for consumer products.

New ECLA Codes for Green Technologies

The European Patent Office has created a new classification scheme for green technologies and applications related to the mitigation of climate change. The new category, identified as Y02 in the ECLA classification, has two main subclasses:

* Y02C - CAPTURE, STORAGE, SEQUESTRATION OR DISPOSAL OF GREENHOUSE
GASES [GHG]
* Y02E - REDUCTION OF GREENHOUSE GASES [GHG] EMISSION, RELATED TO
ENERGY GENERATION, TRANSMISSION OR DISTRIBUTION [N1006]

Each subclass is further subdivided into dozens of sub-groups. There are about 17,000 patents classified in Y02 but more will appear in the coming weeks.

Google Hosts Bulk USPTO Patent Data

The USPTO and Google have entered a two-year agreement to allow Google to provide bulk patent and trademark data to the public, according to a USPTO press release dated June 2.

The agreement requires Google to host the data at no charge and without modification. It appears that the data is being offered in weekly segments, at least for the last ten years or so. Older data (pre-1996) is offered in yearly files.

This is a great day for public access to patent information, especially for people who want to mine patent data or build large patent databases. I'm not sure how useful it will be for average users who might want to download a much smaller, targeted set of data.