U.S. Patent Counts, Jan. 1-Jan 21

In the first three weeks of 2006 the USPTO published 15,973 applications and issued 7,315 patents. This is a drop of about 2,000 patents from the same period a year ago. The number of published applications in the first three weeks of 2005 was 15,830. Based on preliminary data from the USPTO web site.

Vatican to Publishers: Papal Writings Owed Royalties

According to a recent article in the London Times, the Vatican has implemented a new, strict copyright policy on the writings of Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessors going back fifty years. This includes the writings of John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII. Official copyrights on all papal documents will be assigned to the Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Publishers who wish to republish papal writings will be asked to pay a 3-5 percent copyright fee. Those who infringe papal copyrights face a 15 percent fee.

Vatican Cashes In by Putting Price on the Pope's Copyright, The Times, Jan. 23.

USPTO Warns Inventors About ID Theft

According to an article in the Washington Times on Jan. 20, the USPTO is warning inventors not to put sensitive information such as Social Security and bank account numbers on patent applications and related documents, lest it be used to commit identity fraud. Each week thousands of patent application files become available to the public on the USPTO web site. (Applications are published 18 months after the earliest filing date or when a patent issues.) The USPTO implemented a new policy on Oct. 1, 2005 by which it reserved the right to remove such information if inventors include it. An agency spokesman said that there were no known cases of inventor identity theft.

This is not the first time that the dissemination of patent information has been linked to potential inventor fraud. It's interesting to note that in March 1874, just a few years after the Patent Office began publishing a weekly gazette containing abstracts (and inventor information) of newly issued patents, the Scientific American reported that inventors were receiving unsolicited letters from companies offering large sums to purchase their inventions provided they send a small sum ($5) to pay for an evaluation of their patent rights. Of course, few inventors received replies after sending in their money. Copies of the gazette were distributed to public libraries and private subscribers nationwide. Did this make it easier for unscrupulous patent agents and swindlers to contact potential victims?

Inventors Warned of ID Theft, Washington Times, Jan. 20, 2006.

New USPTO Class Order: Design Classes D9, D23, D32

The USPTO has released Classification Order 1853, covering classification changes to design classes:

D9 - Packages and containers for goods
D23 - Environmental heating and cooling; fluid handling and sanitary equipment
D32 - Washing, clearning, or drying machine

The classification order includes new schedules, established and abolished subclasses, definition changes and changes to the USPC--Locarno Classification Concordance. The Lorcano Classification is the international classification system for industrial designs. It is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization and used by 43 countries.

New Nanotechnology Classifications

The EPO has announced a new ECLA section, Y01N, for nanotechnology-related patents. The new section has not yet been added to the esp@cenet classification search, but the schedule is available on the espacenet online forum and Y01N codes are searchable in esp@cenet.

Last year the USPTO also published a cross-reference art class for nanotechnology called Class 977.

EPO 2005 Far East Meets West: Patent Information from Japan and the Far East

Presentations and other materials from the EPO's 2005 Far East Meets West: Patent Information from Japan and the Far East conference is now available on the EPO's web site.

Topics include searching Japanese, Chinese and Korean patent documents, implementation of IPC8, patent information systems, patent law updates and legal status research.

EPO Implements IPC8

The EPO has published new guideliness for searching IPC codes under IPC8, which went into force on Jan. 1. IPC8 is divided into "Core" and "Advanced" levels. The Core level will be updated every three years; the Advanced level is a dynamic system that will be continuously updated every three months or less. There are also new rules governing the assignment of IPC8 codes to invention and non-invention information disclosed in an application.

The EPO has made it possible to search IPC8 codes in esp@cenet using the following options:

• ci: selects IPC Core Invention
• cn: selects IPC Core Non Invention
• ai: selects IPC Advanced Invention
• an: selects IPC Advanced Non Invention
• c: selects IPC Core
• a: selects IPC Advanced

RSS Feeds Make Patent Watching a Breeze

If you're a patent news hound like me, you`re probably in the habit of visiting 3-6 patent office web sites a week looking for the latest official press releases, notices and announcements. Of course, all of that clicking and typing gets old fast. Fortunately, some innovative patent information professionals and attorneys are using RSS technology to streamline the process of reading patent office news.

Two of my favourite patent RSS sites are IPNewsFlash and Rethink(IP). IPNewsflash provides feeds of official notices from the USPTO, JPO, EPO, WIPO, UK, German Patent Office and the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), the EU agency that administers the Community Trade Mark and Community Design programs. Rethink(IP), a service created by patent attorneys Stephen Nipper, J. Matthew Buchanan and Douglas Sorocco, provides feeds for USPTO notices and press releases, and recently filed patent lawsuits.

The USPTO has been publishing a weekly gazette of abstracts of newly issued patents since 1872. In 2002, the USPTO made a great leap backward to 1990 by moving the Official Gazette (OG) from print to CD-ROM format. (To be fair, the USPTO also publishes the most recent 52 weeks of the OG on its web site.) The new version was called eOG:P, a name which combined the worst of the recent Dot Com boom with the federal government`s love of mind-bending acronyms.

Fortunately, two patent information services, Paterra, Inc. and FreePatentsOnline, now provide RSS feeds of recently issued U.S. patents and published applications. The Paterra feeds display a list of the most recent titles with publication dates and the name of the principal inventor. FreePatentsOnline gives title and a link to the full text document stored in FPO`s online database. Both services are free.

Weekly Patent Counts for Dec. 18-31

The USPTO issued 2,512 patents and published 5,059 applications the week of December 18 and issued 3,049 patents and published 5,796 applications the week of December 25, the final week of 2005.* The sharp drop in the number of issued patents that began on October 1 continued throughout the fall; only 33,637 patents were issued in the fourth quarter, a 19 percent drop from the third quarter. The number of published applications was relatively stable; the total for the fourth quarter was 72,651, a .5 percent increase over the previous quarter.

*Based on preliminary data from the USPTO web site.

USPTO Union President Retires

Stephen Barr's recent column in the Washington Post (Dec. 21) noted the retirement of Ronald J. Stern, president of the Patent Office Professional Association (POPA), the union representing patent examiners and other USPTO professional staff, including librarians. Stern worked as a patent examiner for 41 years and served as POPA president for the past 23 years.

What does this have to do with patent information? Good question. Well, under Stern's leadership, POPA exercised significant influence on the development of patent information systems. For example, in 2001 POPA and the USPTO brokered a deal that gave patent examiners a significant salary increase (10-15%) in exchange for giving up paper search files, a goal of USPTO management since the 1980s. This allowed the USPTO to more forward with its implementation of the Image File Wrapper (IFW) system. Today, the web-based IFW contains scanned images of documents in hundreds of thousands of patent applications filed from June 30, 2003 to the present. (Utility and plant applications are eligible, with some exceptions, for publication 18-months after the earliest filing date.) In addition, public users can use IFW to access provisional applications and reexamination proceedings.

The deal with POPA also allowed the USPTO to move forward with its plans to convert its Public Search Facility (PSF) into an electronic research center. The USPTO removed more than 26 miles of linear shelf-space of paper patent documents before relocating the PSF from Crystal City to its new campus in Alexandria.

USPTO Website Satisfaction Trails E-Gov Rankings

The December quarterly report of the E-Government American Customer Satisfaction Index (E-Gov ACSI), an independent survey that measures customer satisfaction with Federal government websites, shows that overall customer satisfaction with government websites has risen from 72.1 a year ago to 73.9 today, a 2.5% increase. About 50 Federal government websites participate in the survey, which was established in 2003.

The USPTO website scored 67, a 1 point increase over a year ago and one of the lowest scores in the category "Portals/Department Main Sites." The USPTO has participated in the survey since December 2003, and its score has fluctuated between 66-68. The National Library of Medicine's MedlinePlus health information website scored 85, one of the highest scores among Federal government websites.

USPTO Website E-Gov ACSI Scores

2004 2005
Q1 66 66
Q2 66 68
Q3 66 66
Q4 66 67

Experts attribute the overall rise to improvements in governmentweb site navigation and search functions. The lack of improvement in the USPTO's score is puzzling, given the rationale (and cost) of the survey. In comparison, the General Services Administration website's score improved 12 points over a year ago following a major overhaul and redesign in 2005.

Sources

American Customer Satisfaction Index

Citizens Warm to Fed Web Sites , Dec. 15, 2005
Federal Computer Week

Weekly Patent/PGPub Counts

U.S. Patents and Published Applications
Week of December 12, 2005

Patents Issued = 2,873*
Published Applications = 4,914*

 Patents  PGPubs  Total
Q1  40,563  71,889  112,452
Q2  41,926  72,776  114,702
Q3  41,693  72,298  113,991
Q4  28,076  61,796  89,872 (to Dec. 15)
Year 152,258  278,759  431,017

There has been a large drop in the number of issued patents since October 1. From January to September, the weekly average of issued patents was 3,184. From October 1 to December 15, the weekly average is 2,552, a drop of about 20 percent. Published applications, on the other hand, have increased slightly over the course of the year. The weekly average of PGPubs from January to September was 5,563. From October 1 to December 15 it was 5,618.

Is the drop in the number of issued patents connected to the USPTO's changing workforce? Perhaps. The USPTO has hired 970 patent examiners this year. Undoubtably, the challenge of integrating and training such a large group (almost 25% of the total examing corps) must be pulling resources away from other activities.

*Based on preliminary data from the USPTO web site.

USPTO Expanding Training Facilities at Expense of Public Search Facilities

Less than 18 months after opening, the new USPTO Public Search Facility (PSF) and Scientific and Technical Information Center (STIC) are being reconfigured in order to accomodate two new USPTO training initiatives scheduled to start in early 2006.

According to the transcript of the November 16 public user's meeting held by the Office of Public Records and Office of Public Information Services, the second floor of the PSF, which opened in September 2004, will be transformed into training space for the new IP Global Academy (IPGA), an IP law program for foreign judges, law enforcement officials, and government officials. The number of public research workstations will be reduced from 308 to 237, more than enough to accomodate peak usage according to officials at the meeting. In addition, bound volumes of patents in numeric order will be moved to a storage space in Suitland, Maryland.

STIC will lose space to SEED, the School for Examiner Education and Development, a new patent examiner training program described by USPTO Director Jon W. Dudas as "collegial and collaborative." Training is a critical priority due to the rapid expansion of the USPTO's patent examiner workforce and growing application backlog. The USPTO hired approximately 970 examiners this year and plans on hiring 1,000 more per fiscal year to 2011, according to Dudas' Sept. 8 statement to the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. There are currently approximately 4,200 patent examiners. More than 400,000 new applications were filed in fiscal year 2005.

espacenet: 65K users/ 11 million page downloads per week

The European Patent Office announced that in the first half of 2005 the number of unique users accessing esp@cenet per week reached 65,000; more than 11 million PDF page downloads per week was also recorded during the same time period.

Recent improvements to espacenet include the addition of a new classification tag for nanotechnology, Y01N, and changing the Number Search to allow users to enter numbers without using a country code. For example, entering the number "6000000" will retrieve US6000000 and AU6000000.

esp@cenet

UM Researchers Tackle Patent Information

A team of researchers at the University of Michigan's School of Information are working with IBM scientists to develop new tools for searching and analyzing patent data. The NSF-funded project will use natural language search technology developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center, where the Free Patent Server was launched in 1997. IBM renamed the service the Intellectual Property Network (IPN) and then Delphion IPN, before selling it to Thomson.

While the press release describes the project as benefitting "individuals and businesses of all sizes," the project description emphasizes the development of new tools to help businesses identify "patent thickets... dense webs of overlapping patent rights that an organization must hack its way through in order to commercialize new technology." Certainly, this will be of most interest to companies in patent-intensive industries such as biotech, pharma/chemical and IT. It's unclear what impact it will have on independent inventors and small and medium-sized entreprises.

UMich SI Press Release
Project Description

Espacenet Full Document Downloads

Full document downloading and printing is now available in espacenet. However, users must first type in a 5-8 digit alphanumeric code in order to begin the download. These alphanumeric codes are intended to thwart spiders and other software that download documents in bulk.

http://ep.espacenet.com/

Mike White
Kingston, Ontario

USPTO Announces Patent Search Template Program

The USPTO has published an executive summary of a new project that aims to create approximately 1,300 "search templates" for each of the ~600 classified areas of science and technology found in the Manual of Classification.

According to the notice published in the 22 November Official Gazette, search templates will define the search field and resource areas of general subject matter, classes/subclasses, patent documents (both US and foreign) and non-patent literature that an examiner should consider each time a patent application is examined in the given classification.

Executive Summary - Search Template Project http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/og/2005/week47/patexsu.htm

Search Template Project
http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/searchtemplates/

Mike White
Kingston, Ontario