PatentScope now includes the national patent collection of Brazil. Data coverage begins in 1972 for bibliographic data and 1989 for abstracts. The total number of records is about 147,000.
I'm the librarian for research services in the Engineering and Science Library at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. I've been working with patent information since 1991, including seven years at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. I believe that the dissemination of patent information is a public good and should be promoted, especially in the education of science and engineering students.