New: FreePatentsOnline Adds DE Patent Data, Other Resources

FreePatentsOnline has updated its interface and added some new resources. One of the most interesting developments is the addition of German patent data. Other new features include blogs, a version of the MPEP and a case law database containing Federal appellate cases referenced in the MPEP.

FPO Adds Non-Patent Literature Collection

FreePatentsOnline (FPO) has added a full-text collection of non-patent literature to its suite of patent databases. Not much is stated about the collection, but according to the copyright notice that appears in each record it appears to be sourced from Gale Cengage Learning, a producer of full-text and bibliographic databases. The NPL collection can be searched alone or with the patent collections.

NPL records include bibliographic data, full-text and tables, but not images. Date coverage appears to start as far back as the early 1980s up through March 2011. In addition to full-text searching, it is possible to limit searches to specific fields such as author name (use IN), article title (use TTL) , and full text (use SPEC). Searching by patent classification is not possible as none of the articles appear to have USPC or IPC codes.

New University Patents Database

FreePatentsOnline has partnered with Technology Transfer Tactics, a website for university tech transfer professionals, to provide a resource for searching university-owned patents.

Data for about 150 universities (mostly American) is available. Clicking on a name of a university will retrieve a list of US patents and published applications assigned to that university.

The number retrieved may be different from what you retrieve in a manual search. For example, the link for Johns Hopkins University retrieved 1,766 documents, but I was able to retrieve 1,950 documents in FPO using the search query an/"johns hopkins". The same search in the USPTO databases retrieved 1,852 documents. It's not clear why this is so, but it may be because the data in the university patent search is not in sync with the live FPO database.

PCT Coverage in Public Patent Databases

How the data in a database or search engine is structured is as important (or more so) as the data itself.

I was reminded of this old rule-of-thumb a couple of weeks ago when I decided to compare coverage of PCT applications in public patent databases, namely PatentScope, FreePatentsOnline, esp@cenet, and Patent Lens. The results were fairly consistent until I got to Patent Lens, where my benchmark searches retrieved far more documents than the other three databases. (See table below.)

Most surprising was that my date of publication searches retrieved many more documents for five of the six dates I had selected. If PatentScope, which is the official record of the WIPO, says that 3,280 PCT applications were published on March 19, 2009, why did Patent Lens tell me it found 4,364? Obviously, this has serious implications for anyone using Patent Lens to do competitive intelligence, market research or simply track the number of PCTs filed by their organization.

Fortunately, the friendly folks at Patent Lens provided the explanation: Patent Lens indexes all versions of published PCTs, which inflates the number of retrieved documents. This includes subsequently published international search reports (A3 or A9), amended (A4) and corrected versions (A9). PatentScope and espacenet link these documents to the record for the initial publication (A1 or A2). FreePatentsOnline's PCT coverage apparently includes only the first published application (A1 or A2), although I haven't yet confirmed it. This explains the consistency in search results in FPO, PatentScope and esp@cenet.

So what are the practical implications for non-IP professionals who use Patent Lens? Well, if a researcher or tenure-track professor searches his or her name or university, they may get an inflated document count.

Titles Added to Cited References in FPO

US patent records in FreePatentsOnline now display titles of cited US patent documents. This is a nice improvement since it provides more information about the reference without forcing you to leave the current document. Titles of cited references available in the USPTO database nor are included on patent documents.

However, I noticed recently that some FPO records do not include all the older cited references. For example, US 3,803,463 cites 8 US patent documents, the earliest being 8,843 issued in 1852 and 644,896 from 1900. However, the FPO record for this patent displays only 6 cited patents, the earliest being 2,401,815 from 1946.

After further testing it appears that the problem is limited to pre-1976 patents.

FreePatentsOnline Launches CitePatents

FreePatentsOnline has launched a new site called CitePatents that is designed to make it easier for journalists, bloggers, copy writers and website owners and to link to patent documents. I hope this encourages more newspapers to link to patent documents in their stories. Too many journalists provide no details about related patents in stories about new products and infringement lawsuits. This wasn't always the case. Fifty years ago newspaper stories frequently included references to patent numbers.

FreePatentsOnline Increases Personal Portfolios to 10,000 Documents

Individual accounts on FreePatentsOnline now can contain up to 20 portfolios and up to 10,000 patent documents. Users are still limited to exporting bibiliographic data from a maximum of 250 documents at a time. These improvements will be useful for searchers who maintain large collections of patent documents or who run multiple patent searches. Thanks, FPO!

SumoBrain Offers Free Registration

SumoBrain, the patent search system from the creators of FreePatentsOnline, is now offering free accounts. SumoBrain features full-text cross-collection searching of US patents and applications, EP patents and applications, PCT documents and Japanese abstracts, portfolios, alerts, and PDF download capabilities (for a fee). SumoBrain's content and search engine are very similar to FPO. And like FPO, registered users can save up to 1000 documents in 1-5 portfolios, and download bibliographic data from up to 250 records (at a time) in spreadsheet format.