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.

EPO and USPTO Agree to Develop New Patent Classification

Yesterday the EPO and USPTO announced that they have agreed to jointly develop a patent classification system based on ECLA and the IPC. The press releases are here and here.

Both offices have yet to work out governance and operational details of the project, so changes to the USPC are not imminent. Some initial ground work has already been done. Since 2002 the USPTO has been establishing e-subclasses that correspond to classifications used by the EPO and JPO.

Why has the USPTO held onto its classification system long after most offices have adopted the IPC? One reason often cited by supporters is that the USPC is far more detailed, allowing inventions to be classified in about 150,000 subclasses as opposed to about 80,000 subclasses in the IPC. ECLA, which is based on the IPC, has about 130,000 subclasses. Others praise the USPC's detailed subclass definitions that guide patent searchers through the USPC's non-intuitive, complex and arcane structure.

The new EPO-USPTO classification will combine the best of both systems. It will be interesting to see what will happen to the sections of the USPC for design patents (Classes D1-D34, D99) and plant patents (Class PLT).

Patent # 8,000,000 in 2011?

The USPTO is fast approaching another milestone... Patent number 8,000,000 might be less than a year away. The highest numbered utility patent (as of Oct. 19, 2010) is 7,818,816. At the current rate of about 60,000 patents per quarter, the USPTO could reach the 8 million mark as early as next August or September.

Patent 7,000,000 was issued on February 14, 2006 to American chemical company Dupont for a new type of polysaccharide fiber. Patent 7,500,000 was issued on March 3, 2009 to IBM.

How Complete is the USPTO Patent Database?

There was an interesting discussion last week on the Intellogist blog about the number of allegedly missing patent documents in the USPTO's PatFT database. Of course, this is an important question for anyone who uses the database, but especially for anyone who is doing legal or business research. (PatFT is by default the public patent database of record, although the USPTO does not make this claim.)

Determining the number of records that should be in the PatFT database is relatively easy. The USPTO assigns patent numbers in sequential order, as it has done since 1836. Let's take a closer look at utility patents issued from 1976 to the present. We know that the number of the first utility patent issued in 1976 is 3,930,271 and the highest patent number issued to date (as of Oct. 12, 2010) is 7,814,566. Subtract the latter from the former and add one and you get a total of 3,884,296. So the full-text collection in PatFT should contain 3,884,296 utility patent documents.

However, some of the numbers in the 3,930,271-7,814,566 range are unused because allowed applications (applications that are on the verge of being issued and have been assigned numbers) may be withdrawn from issue by the USPTO or the applicant. These numbers are withdrawn permanently and not reassigned to different applications. (The USPTO publishes lists of these withdrawn patent numbers each week in the Official Gazette.)

How many withdrawn patent numbers are there in our time frame? That's also easy to determine because the USPTO publishes an up-to-date list of withdrawn patent numbers. According to the list, there are 19,753 withdrawn patent numbers in the range 3,930,271-7,814,566. So we must subtract this number from the number above to get the total number of utility patents issued after Jan. 1, 1976 in the PatFT database.

"Potentially assigned patent numbers" - "withdrawn patent numbers" = "total issued patents"

3,884,296 - 19,753 = 3,864,543

We can check this number in PatFT by searching the "Application Type" field (APT) for patents coded "1" (utility patent applications).

apt/1 = 3,864,555

This search retrieves 3,864,555 hits, which is 12 *more* than the number we expected to see based on the calculation above. For a collection of almost 4 million documents, this is a very, very small discrepancy. I would expect similar results for other types of patent documents in the database, e.g. plants, designs, etc.

The reasonable conclusion is that there are no significant gaps in the USPTO's PatFT database, at least for the period after 1975. Of course, no database is perfect and there could be a few missing records in PatFT, but they are probably extremely rare.

U.S. Patent Counts, Q3

The USPTO issued 63,859 patents from July 1 through Sept. 30, a fraction less than the previous quarter but a large increase over last year's Q3 total of 47,042. Published applications set another record with nearly 90,000 released, a 17 precent increase over the same period in 2009. At this rate, the USPTO is on track to publish between 550,000-600,000 patent documents in 2010.

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
Q1-Q3 ..... 183,384 ..... 251,423 ..... 428,920

*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 Sept. 30, 2010

Utility patents ..... 7,640,598 - 7,805,766
Reissues ..... RE41,067 - RE41,788
PGPubs ..... 2010/0000001 - 2010/0251450
Designs ..... D607,176 - D624,725
Plants ...... PP20,622 - PP21,353
SIRs ..... H2,234 - H2,249

New Database of IP Case Studies

The WIPO has launched a new database that contains profiles of intellectual property case studies from around the world. The collection of 100+ cases cover patents, trade marks and copyright and could be an excellent source of material for presentations and programs.

Changes to Class 386 - Classification Order 1900

The USPTO has changed the title of Class 386, Television Signal Processing for Dynamic Recording or Reproducing. The new title is Motion Video Signal Processing for Recording or Reproducing. These and other changes are detailed in Classification Order 1900, issued on Sept. 7, 2010. The order abolishes subclasses 1-131 and establishes subclasses 200-361.

Approximately 16,441 patents (91 percent issued after 1975) are classified in Class 386. There are more than 13,000 published applications classified in Class 386. The oldest patent in the class is No. 1,116,949, issued on November 10, 1914 to a Dr. Curt Stille of Berlin, Germany for a new method of transmitting photographs telegraphically. It's unknown if Stille's invention was a commercial success, but in the years after he received a number of patents related to the transmission and recording of sound. In the 1920s, Stille entered into a partnership with the Marconi Wireless Telegraphic Co. to produce and market a tape recording machine called the Marconi-Stille.

The top patent owners in Class 386 include Sony, Toshiba, Matsushita, Canon, Samsung, Hitachi, LG and Thomson Licensing.

Happy Birthday, Etch A Sketch!

Etch A Sketch, the iconic drawing toy of the 1960s and 1970s, is celebrating its 60th birthday this year. It was invented in the mid 1950s by Andre Cassagnes, an electrician in France. Lacking funds to patent his invention, Mr Cassagnes sought help from an investor named Paul Chaze. Chaze agreed to pay the patent application fees and act as Cassagnes' agent. He eventually persuaded the Ohio Art Company to license the toy, which it launched during the 1960 holiday season.

Curiously, when Chaze sent his business partner Arthur Grandjean to apply for a patent, somehow Grandjean's name ended up on the application as the inventor. Grandjean applied for a French patent in May 1959, which was followed two months later by a U.S. application. The U.S. patent, 3,055,113, issued on May 31, 1962. Other patents followed in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Although Etch A Sketch became a hugely popular toy the patent makes only a minor reference to its amusement applications. In fact, the title of the patent is "Tracing Device". The patent is classified under Class 33, geometrical instruments.

The Ohio Art Company continued to develop the Etch A Sketch in response to changing tastes and technology. In 1988, it received a patent, 4,764,763, for an electronic version of the toy marketed as the Etch A Sketch Animator 2000. It was not a success. The original design is as popular as ever and is sold in classic, mini, pocket and travel sizes.

Patent Models Index

The Smithsonian has published new guide and index to patent models owned by the National Museum of American History. The two volume work is available for free online and can also be purchased in hard copy from the Smithsonian Institution Press. Volume 1 provides listings by patent number and title of the invention. Volume 2 contains listings by inventor name and residence. A great resource for fans and collectors of 19th century patent models.

U.S. Patent Counts, Q2 2010

There was a huge jump in the number of issued U.S. patents in Q2. The USPTO issued 64,037 patents from April through June, 15.4 percent more than in Q1 and 31.7 percent more than the same period in 2009. The number of published applications also increased 9.5 percent, reversing a downward trend first noted in Q4 2009. If this output continues through the rest of the year the USPTO will publish a record-breaking 550,000 documents.

Table 1. Quarterly Patent Counts*

2010 ..... Patents (B) .....PGPubs (A)..... Total (A + B)
Q1 ..... 55,488 ..... 77,520 ..... 133,008
Q2 ..... 64,037 ..... 84,919 ..... 143,069

*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 for 2010, Jan. 1 - June 30

Utility patents ..... 7,640,598 - 7,748,052
Reissues ..... RE41,067 - RE41,411
PGPubs ..... 2010/0000001 - 2010/0162457
Designs ..... D607,176 - D618,875
Plants ...... PP20,622 - PP21,134
SIRs ..... H2,234 - H2,242