PatentScope Mobile

PatentScope now offers a mobile search interface. As far as I know, this is the first patent office database optimized for mobile devices.

Also read that WIPO is planning to add "the bulk" of patent data from the IP5 patent offices, e.g. EPO, USPTO, JPO, SIPO and KIPO, to PatentScope in 2011. The EPO data was added a couple of months ago.

This will be a great addition to an already excellent tool.

2011 Patent Update @ Chemistry Librarians' Workshop

A couple of weeks ago I gave a brief update on patent search tool developments at the Chemistry Librarians' Workshop at the University of Toronto. One of the topics I covered was the recent addition of Markush searching in SciFinder. I'm still trying to figure out how to promote this powerful tool to faculty and grad students, most of whom are not too keen on reading patent documents.

Beach Chair Breaks New Ground

The first rule of inventing might be: no matter how commonplace a device is, someone will always think of a way to improve it. Take, for example, award-winning industrial designer Larry Laske's new beach chair. It's basically a chair backrest molded in plastic with two spikes to anchor it in the sand. Laske filed a U.S. application in 2004 and was awarded a patent in 2007 (7178875B2). According to the patent, Laske's intent was to create a chair that is "lightweight, easy to carry and simple to use." You can buy them in blue, green, yellow and orange on Laske's website www.beachthingy.com. With the exception of the elimination of one of the handholds, the finished product is identical to the patent drawing.

The beach chair has been reinvented many times over. One of the earliest patents, which the patent examiner cited in his review, was issued in 1919 (1312774). 

ECLA Change Reports

The European Patent Office is now publishing a monthly report on changes to the European Classification system (ECLA). ECLA has about 140,000 sub-classes, making it on par with the US Patent Classification. Changes are grouped in three categories: Added, Deleted and Updated. The reports are available at http://www.epo.org/searching/essentials/classification/ecla/changes.html.

Common Patent Classification Project

Interesting story in IP Frontline about the development of a common classification scheme by the EPO and USPTO. The project is one of ten joint initiatives announced last year by the USPTO, EPO, JPO, KIPO and SIPO. (See the Five IP Offices website). Initial planning is well underway at the EPO and USPTO, but that most of the work will be done in 2012-13. According to the report, the USPTO will abolish its own classification system when the new common system is operational.

Plastics Archive at Syracuse Univ Library

Syracuse University Library's Plastics Collection is a great source of information on all things plastic from the late 1800s to the present. Many objects in the collection have patent references.

Patents for a Royal Wedding

Since an estimated 2 billion people will watch Prince William marry Kate Middleton tomorrow, I thought a royal wedding themed patent story was in order.

Flowers play a prominent role in weddings, so I searched for plant patents named for members of the royal family. Sure enough, in 1987, Thomas Watson of Wisconsin received three plant patents for varieties of Amelanchier, a shrub, which he named in honor of Prince Charles (PP6,039), Princess Diana (PP6,041) and Prince William (PP6,040).

Lowell Hoy of Indiana patented a new variety of rose named "Lady Diana" (PP5,360) in 1983.  

And in 1999, Robin Marks of Aylesbury, UK filed a plant patent application (2001/0100101) for a dahlia variety named Diana, Princess of Wales.


There are no plant patents named in honor of Kate Middleton, but I suspect that we'll be seeing some soon.

US Patent Counts, Q1 2011

In the first quarter of 2011 the USPTO issued 62,132 patents, an increase of 1.7 percent from the previous quarter and 11.9 percent from the same period last year. The number of published applications declined by 4 percent from the previous quarter and was essentially unchanged from a year ago.

The USPTO is fast approaching its 8 millionth utility patent, which is likely to be issued in the second half of the year, probably in August. Patent 7,000,000, for a new type of polysaccharide fiber, was issued five years ago on February 14, 2006 to Dupont.

Patent No. 6,000,000 was granted on December 7, 1999 to inventors Jeff Hawkins and Michael Albanese. Their invention was a system for synchronizing files on two computers, the core technology of the Palm Pilot PDA, the first commercially successful hand-held electronic organizer. Palm was purchased by H-P for about $1.2 billion in 2010.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the first published patent application on March 15, 2001. Since that date the USPTO has published approximately 2,706,056 utility and plant patent applications. Published applications now account for about 30 percent of all U.S. patent documents.

Table 1. Quarterly Patent Document Counts*


2011 ..... Patents (B) ..... PGPubs (A) ..... Total (A + B)
Q1 ..... 62,132 ..... 78,481 ..... 140,613


*Based on preliminary weekly data from the USPTO website. Totals may change after the fact due to withdrawn patents and published applications.


Table 2. Number Ranges, Jan. 1 through Mar. 31, 2011


Utility patents ..... 7,861,317 - 7,917,966 (56,331)
Reissues ..... RE42,020 - RE42,264 (243)
PGPubs ..... 2011/0000001 - 2011/0078,838 (78,481)
Designs ..... D629,996 - D635,325 (5,326)
Plants ...... PP20,816 - PP21,833 (18)
SIRs ..... H2,251-H2,252 (2)

World Cities Ranked by Patent Productivity

Today's Globe and Mail published an interesting list of 24 cities ranked by the number of U.S. patents per 100,000 population. The top ranked Canadian city was Vancouver (11th), followed by Toronto (12th), Calgary (13th), Montreal (15th) and Halifax (20th). Seven of the top ten cities were in the U.S. There were some surprising omissions. Houston, for example, didn't make the list despite its high patent output. And San Diego and the Research Triangle area in North Carolina, home to many research universities and biotech companies, were also missing.

It's easy to dismiss such rankings as U.S.-centric because they're based only on USPTO data. But the fact is that many Canadian inventors and companies file applications first in the U.S. According to the USPTO's Fiscal Year 2010 annual report, Canadians filed 11,250 applications in 2009. In comparison, the CIPO received 5,215 patent applications from Canadian residents in 2009-2010.

It would be interesting to re-calculate this list based on PCT data from PatentScope. Cities with high filings of PCT patent applications per 100K pop. might indicate concentrations of companies with global rather than national or regional patent strategies.

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.

Earthquake-proof Buildings

The 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on March 11 is a massive natural disaster and human tragedy, but it could have been much worse. News reports have credited Japan`s strict building codes with saving countless lives. Thanks to Japanese engineering, thousands of buildings and other structures survived the initial earthquake and numerous aftershocks. Japan`s leadership in earthquake resistant technologies is evident in the patent record. Japanese engineers and scientist have filed almost 70 percent of the patent applications related to protecting structures from earthquakes. 

The main IPC codes related to earthquake-resistant structures are: 

• E04H 9/02 - Buildings .. withstanding earthquakes or sinking of ground
• E02D 27/34 - Foundations for sinking or earthquake territories

In espacenet there are 15,180 patent documents classified in E04H 9/02, 71 percent (10,816) of these are JP documents. About 4,159 patent documents are classified in E02D 27/34, 60 percent (2,479) are JP documents.

Some of the leading patent assignees in this field are Japanese corporations, including Kajima, Oiles, Shimzu, and Nippon Steel.

PatentScope Adds EPO Collection

The EPO patent document backfile, which includes bibliographic data from 1978 through mid-2010 and full-text data from 1996 through mid-2010, is now available in PatentScope. With this addition, the WIPO's patent search system has 7.7 million patent documents from 21 regional and national patent offices.

Earlier this year PatentScope added the national patent collections of Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Peru and Uruguay. Search interfaces in Korea, Russian and Spanish have also been deployed.

One Classification to Rule Them All?

The USPTO and EPO have agreed to create a new Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) based on the IPC. You can read the press releases here and here. The new system will be based largely on ECLA, the European version of the IPC, but incorporate the best practices of the U.S. Patent Classification system.

The IPC was created in the 1960s as a common classification system intended to replace the numerous national patent classification systems then in existence. The official treaty creating the IPC system, the Strasbourg Agreement, was signed in 1971. There are now 61 countries party to the agreement. Few national classification systems are still in use. The Canadian Patent Classification system was abandoned in the early 1990s.  

US Patent Counts, 2010

The USPTO issued 244,421 patents and published 333,210 applications in 2010, an all-time high of 577,631 patent documents. The number of patents issued in Q4 dropped to 61,037, a slight decrease from the previous quarter. The number of published applications also declined in Q4 to 81,787.

It has been ten years since the USPTO began publishing utility and plant patent applications. In that time, the USPTO has published about 2.6 million applications.

Table 1. Quarterly Patent Document Counts*
2010 ..... Patents (B) .....PGPubs (A)..... Total (A + B)
Q1 ..... 55,488 ..... 77,520 ..... 133,008
Q2 ..... 64,037 ..... 84,919 ..... 143,069
Q3 ..... 63,859 ..... 88,984 ..... 152,843
Q4 ..... 61,037 ..... 81,787 ..... 142,824

Q1-Q4 ..... 244,421 ..... 333,210 ..... 577,631

*Based on preliminary weekly data from the USPTO website. Totals may change after the fact due to withdrawn patents and published applications.

Table 2. Number Ranges, Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2010

Utility patents ..... 7,640,598 - 7,861,316
Reissues ..... RE41,067 - RE42,019
PGPubs ..... 2010/0000001 - 2010/0333245
Designs ..... D607,176 - D629,995
Plants ...... PP20,622 - PP21,603
SIRs ..... H2,234 - H2,250

Wikipedia References Increase 81 Percent in 2010

The number of US patents that cite Wikipedia increased again in 2010. Approximately 1,461 patents issued last year contain one or more references to Wikipedia articles, 81 percent more than in 2009. Although this is a tiny fraction of the total number of patents issued (roughly half a percent), it is still an impressive increase. In fact, because of variations in how Wikipedia articles are cited in patents (for example, in the specification rather than the list of references) the actual number may be higher. Wikipedia was first cited in a US patent in 2003. In 2006, the USPTO banned patent examiners from citing Wikipedia articles as prior art.

The top ten assignees shown in Table 1 hold nearly 23 percent of patents that cite Wikipedia. Technology firms dominate the list, which suggests that computer-related patents are more likely to cite Wikipedia than patents related to other technologies. Indeed, the top three assignees, Microsoft, IBM and Apple, account for almost 12 percent of the total. Three of the top ten, Intel, Infineon and Micron, are manufacturers of semiconductors and other computer hardware. Two of the top ten assignees, Boeing and JPMorgan, are not directly involved computer-related technologies. Only 5 percent of patents that cite Wikipedia are unassigned.

Table 2 shows the top ten primary patent classes assigned to patents that cite Wikipedia. The majority of the classes relate to information and communication technologies (ICT). Only two classes in the top ten, 514 and 424, cover technologies (drugs and pharmaceuticals) not related to ICT. As the data shows, the percentage of patents in each class that cite Wikipedia exceeds the percentage of all patents issued in 2010. For example, Class 707 accounts for 7.21% of patents that cite Wikipedia articles but only 2.18% of all patents issued in 2010. This is true for all classes with the exception of Class 370.
 

Gloves Off in Dispute Over Hockey Bag

Hockey fans will enjoy this story about two Canadian inventors suing a company for allegedly copying the design of their patented hockey equipment bag: Dropping the gloves over a hockey bag, Globe and Mail, Dec. 16, 2010.

The bag is patented in Canada (CA 2145612) and the US (US 5,797,612). The US patent has been cited by at least 25 patents.

USPTO to Remove Inventor's Mailing Address from Patent Docs

The USPTO will no longer include the inventor's mailing address on unassigned patents and published applications because of privacy concerns. However, correspondence information will continue to be available in Public PAIR. Patent documents will only display the city and state for US inventors or the city and country for non-US residents.

Privacy is a good thing. And with the number of cases of identity theft and fraud rising, the USPTO's practice was seriously out of date... The WIPO implemented a similar policy for PCT applications a couple of years ago.

Scam artists and patent promoters have been using inventor mailing address data for 150 years to ply their schemes. Many of these schemes involved sending a letter from a bogus company to an inventor expressing interest in licensing their patent. The letter would ask the inventor to send a small fee, usually $5, to the company to pay for a legal opinion on the validity of their patent. Of course, the inventor never heard back.

My favourite inventor scam dates from the 1890s. A clever con artist located in Paris would send inventors a letter announcing that they had been awarded a medal by a prestigious (but bogus) scientific or technical society. In order to collect their medal, all they had to do was send a small sum to cover postage...

However, it will make it more difficult to identify the ownership of published applications. Unlike most patent offices, the USPTO does not require applicants to declare an assignee on their applications. However, it was possible to make an educated guess about the ownership of a published application by looking for a corporate address in the correspondence field.
The order was published in the Nov. 23 OG and takes effect in three months.

AusPat beta Launched

IP Australia recently released a new version of its patent database, AusPat beta. The new version allows users to retrieve patent specifications from 1904 to the present. Approximately half of the 1.4 million AU patent specs have been loaded. The complete collection is expected to be available in March 2011. Pre-1980 documents appear to be searchable only by patent number. Not sure if or when other bibliographic data will be added. See AusPat beta users guide for search tips and other.

PatentScope Adds Patents of Brazil

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.

Patent Mystery: The Strange Case of 3,060,165

The recent discussion on the Intellogist blog about missing patent documents in the USPTO patent database reminded me of the curious case of patent no. 3,060,165. The full-text TIFF image of this patent was removed from the USPTO database sometime in 2003. The exact date of and reason for its disappearance are not readily available, but here is what is known:

Our story begins in 1962 when a team of scientists working for the U.S. Army received a patent for a method of producing ricin, a deadly poison made from ordinary castor beans. Why the military would want to patent such a thing is beyond me. Why they would allow it to be disclosed to the world in a patent document is equally mystifying. Maybe they wanted to strike a cross-licensing deal with the Soviets.

Ricin has been implicated in at least one political assassination, the 1978 murder in London of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov by communist agents, and, more recently, terrorist attacks in Washington, DC. In February 2004, a small amount of ricin was found in the mailroom of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Luckily, no one was injured, but several buildings on Capitol Hill were closed for about a week. (New York Times, Feb. 4, 2004) But our patent had disappeared long before ricin was discovered in the Senate mail.

For forty years patent 3,060,165 resided in happy obscurity in the search files of the USPTO. It attracted little attention, being cited in only two other patents. Its debut on the web probably occurred in October 2000 when the USPTO completed loading all patent documents into the PatFT database. Things changed suddenly in February 2003 when television station WABC of NYC aired a sensationalist report that chided the USPTO for allowing the public to have access to a "recipe for a bio-terror weapon more deadly than cyanide". Apparently, this caught the attention of several prominent politicians from New York who started asking questions. The patent quietly vanished from the USPTO website.

Security experts were quick to debunk the idea that the patent was a threat to the public safety. (GlobalSecurity.org, July 24, 2004) In fact, its removal from the USPTO database was completely ineffective because copies remained available in other open patent databases such as Google Patents and the German Patent Office's Depatisnet system. In addition, dozens of libraries in the USPTO's patent depository library network probably have copies on microfilm.

The patent was never connected to the 2004 Capitol Hill incident, but it did surface later that year in a bizarre extortion case involving a Maryland man, Myron Tereshchukin. In March 2004, FBI agents raided Tereshchukin's home and found, among other dangerous substances, ingredients for making ricin and a copy of the notorious patent. The FBI had been investigating Tereshchukin for making threats against MicroPatent, a patent information company that is now owned by Thomson Reuters. (New York Times, Aug. 7, 2005) In Sept. 2005, Tereshchukin pled guilty to possession of a biological weapon and possession of explosives and was sentenced to seven years, plus three years probation. (FBI, WMD Cases)

I think it's about time for the USPTO to acknowledge that this patent is not a threat and make it available again for public inspection.