Comparison of Free Patent Databases

Patent databases continue to proliferate on the internet. The most recent addition is Patents.com, which describes itself as "one of the most comprehensive free patent search services on the web." I get a little annoyed when I see claims such as this, especially when the database provider doesn't state the contents and dates of coverage. Having a great search engine doesn't mean much if the underlying data is incomplete. So I figured that it was prime time to update my comparison of patent database search engines.

When I did this last in February 2007 I compared Delpion, FreePatentsOnline, Google Patents, Patent Lens, Patent Monkey and the USPTO website. This time I compared five patent databases: Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, Patents.com, Patents Lens and the USPTO patent database. Patent Monkey was absorbed by Patents.com in 2007. I decided to drop Delphion because it offers access only to US issued patents. Google Patents has added data for US published applications but it's unclear how frequently the data is updated. The other three non-USPTO databases are updated weekly.

All test searches were restricted to US patents issued from 1976 forward in order to allow for comparisons between databases. (Some databases include non-US patents and/or patents prior to 1976.) My search categories were inventor name, assignee name, keyword in title, and current US patent classification.

In the inventor search category, most of the databases came very close or slightly exceeded the results from the USPTO database. The only exception was Google Patents, which failed miserably at finding patents by inventor name. Perhaps Google has disabled their inventor name search.



Table 1. Inventor Name Search Comparison



Company name search results were also consistent across most of the databases. Again, the exception was Google Patents which found significantly fewer patents for two of the four companies searched. Patent Lens performed well except that it found approximately 200 fewer patents assigned to Bombardier than the other databases (except for Google). This might be explained by the fact that Bombardier's patent portfolio includes more than 200 design patents which are not covered in Patent Lens. FreePatentsOnline did poorly with "Queen's University", possibly because the apostrophe threw off the search engine.



Table 2. Company Name Search Comparison




The title keyword search produced varied results. Patent Lens, Patents.com and FPO did very well in three of the four searches. Google Patents found significantly fewer patents in all four searches. In a couple of searches FPO actually retrieved more patents that the USPTO database. But this might be because FPO searches withdrawn patents, which are not included in the USPTO database.




Table 3. Title Keyword Search Comparison



The best scoring database in the current US patent classification search was Patents.com, which produced identical or very close results to the USPTO database. FreePatentsOnline also did well, except when asked to retrieve patents in 623/1.1. The decimal subclass might have confused FPO's search engine. Google Patents and Patent Lens did poorly. Patent Lens does not index USPC or IPC codes, so the only way to search them is to do a crude keyword search against the front page. The results are next to useless.



Table 4. USPC Search Comparison




Overall, the USPTO database search engine produced the most reliable search results. Patents.com performs well for USPC and inventor name searches. Patent Lens is good for inventor, assignee and keyword searches but not USPC searches. FPO is almost as good as the USPTO database but punctuation may throw off search results. I would not recommend Google Patents for anything except retrieving PDF copies of known patents. Its search results are simply too unpredictable and incomplete.

The USPTO does score poorly in the patent document image category because its images are stored in TIFF format rather than PDF. Users must install a TIFF viewer in their browser in order to view patent documents from the USPTO website and then the documents must be viewed or printed one page at a time. The other four databases in this review support mutli-page PDF downloads.


Table 5. Patent Database Summary

Patents and Wall Street

We typically think of innovation as a good thing: Needs inspire ideas, ideas develop into inventions, inventions become patents, and patents make possible new products and services that enhance the quality of human life. But is innovation ever a bad thing? Well, yes, innovation can have a negative effect when it leads to unintended or unforeseen results. In some ways, innovation is to blame for the current U.S. financial crisis. During the past ten years the major players at the heart of the crisis--big Wall Street investment banks and financial companies--developed increasingly complicated and risky investment strategies based on the bundling and trading of mortgages. This has turned out to be a bust. Bankers have been pursuing other innovative strategies, as can be seen in a number of patents and published patent applications assigned to Wall Street firms. We don't usually think of bankers as inventors, but a change in the interpretation of U.S. patent law in the late 1990s (See State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc.) that allowed the patenting of so-called business methods inspired firms to apply for patents on everything from methods of predicting the value of mortgages to picking stock market winners and losers. Will we see fewer such patents in the future? Probably, since both the government and surviving firms will be much less interested in risky innovation.

Top Ten Financial Companies Ranked by Patents+Published Applications*

1. J.P. Morgan Chase ..... 91
2. Bank of America ..... 86
3. Lehman Brothers ..... 74
4. Goldman Sachs ..... 63
5. Merrill Lynch ..... 49
6. Morgan Stanley ..... 37
7. Fannie Mae ..... 28
8. Wachovia ..... 26
9. AIG ..... 16
10. Freddie Mac ..... 8

*Based on data from the USPTO website.

Eco-Patent Commons

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development has developed an Eco-Patent Commons, a website where companies can pledge their environmentally-friendly patents to the public domain. So far, seven companies, Bosch, DuPont, IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes, Sony and Xerox have pledged about 75 patents.

Arctic Biotechnology Revealed in Patents

Could more effective medicines and tastier ice cream come from the belly of a shrimp living in the icy waters off Greenland? A new report called Bioprospecting in the Arctic, sponsored by the United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies, looks at the current state of research into useful genetic materials found in plants, animals, fish and microbes living in the far north. Included in the report is a list of 31 patents and patent applications based on Arctic genetic resources, such as reindeer, northern shrimp, Artic fox, Arctic scallop, Atlantic cod and junipers. The list of patents is only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. A quick esp@cenet search on some of the species named in the patents turns up dozens of additional documents. For example, there are at least ten patents related to the marine microbe rhodothermus marinus.

IPI-ConfEx 2009, March 1-5 - Venice, Italy

Registration is now open for next year's IPI-ConfEx, a patent information conference organized by European patent information professional associations. The host city is Venice-Mestre and the theme is "Best Practices in Patent Information Management and Searching." If you're seriously interested in patent information and can afford the airfare and registration, this is definitely an event to attended. Check out the testimonials from past conferences.

Patents.com - PatentMonkey Redux

There's (yet) another way to search patents on the internet: A new patent database/IP exchange portal called Patents.com has just launched. Patents.com is the brainchild of Robert Monster, a hi-tech venture capitalist, authority on market research and former product developer for Procter and Gamble, and Paul Ratcliffe, a patent attorney and founder of PatentMonkey.com, a patent search site that operated from early 2006 to January 2008.

Patents.com searches full text US utility, reissue and design patents, US applications (including plant patent applications) and European patent documents (from 1998 forward?). Detailed content information is lacking, but it appears that US coverage starts in 1976 (2001 for applications, of course). The most recent data retrieved was from patents issued on Aug. 26. EP coverage is more difficult to determine. Several test searches retrieved no patents before 1999. PDFs are available for US docs but not EP docs. Machine translation for fifteen langauges is offered.

Simple search allows simple word searches (no phrase searching or boolean operators). Advanced search allows users to search two or more terms using Boolean operators and wildcards. Expert search allows users to construct complicated fielded queries. Bulk search retrieves multiple documents by patent number. A cluster function groups keywords into a browsable list. At first glance, searches against US docs retrieve similar results as searches done in the USPTO database. It's more difficult to evaluate searches on EP docs as the coverage is unknown and there seem to be problems with some of the fields. I never could get the date range search to work properly.

Performance is faily fast, but the image view caused Firefox 3.0.1 to crash twice. There's a lot more to explore... for example the Community and IP Exchange sites...

Austrian esp@cenet Upgrade - New Content and Search Capabilities

According to an announcement on the esp@cenet web site, an upgrade to the Austrian esp@cenet server has added additional content and capabilities. It now contains AT A and B documents and utility models from 1995 forward. Advanced search features now include full text searching, date range searching and multiple keywords. Prost!

2008 World Patent Report

The WIPO recently released its 2008 World Patent Report, which contains all kinds of interesting statistics on patent activity worldwide. In 2006, a stunning 1.76 million new applications were filed worldwide, driven largely by filings in China, Korea and the U.S.

One of the most interesting sections covers patent filings per GDP, population and R&D. Both Japan (#1) and Korea (#2) had more than 2000 new resident applications per million population. (Japan 127 million pop. = / Korea pop. = 49 million) The U.S. (#3) managed just shy of 800 resident filings per million (with a pop. of 300 million). In R&D, Korea was the leader again, with slightly more than 5 applications per million $ of R&D funding. Russia, Japan, China and (surprisingly) New Zealand rounded out the top five. The US ranked #7 and Canada #29. Clearly, Asia is keen on generating IP.

All this demand is creating huge problems for patent offices. In 2006, the USPTO had more that one million pending applications, a 30% increase over 2004. Japan has about 800K pending applications, up from 600K in 2004. The EPO, on the other hand, has about 250,000 pending applications, which is about the same as 2004 and 2005. It takes about 40 months on average for the EPO to process an application but only 30 months at the JPO and USPTO. The Korean IP Office processes applications in about 20 months.

How are Engineering Librarians Using Patent Information?

A few months ago I surveyed my fellow academic engineering librarians to find out how they were using web-based patent databases in their day-to-day work with students and faculty. Patent literature has had a role in engineering education, especially design engineering courses, for many decades. Of course, before the mid-1990s when free patent databases started appearing on the web, most engineering students did not have easy access to patent information unless they were lucky enough to live near a patent depository library.

Forty people completed the survey. The results were pretty much what I expected. Academic engineering librarians are heavy users of patent databases. 57.5% reported giving workshops on patent searching to undergraduate engineering students, while 52.5% delivered workshops to graduate students. The most popular databases taught were the USPTO, Google Patents and FreePatentsOnline.

Librarians also reported frequent usage of patent databases to answer a variety of questions from students and faculty. 86.8% reported helping someone locate a patent document. 78% reported helping someone do a general search (inventor, keyword, assignee, etc.) and 52.6% reported helping someone do a patent search using classification. The most popular databases were the USPTO, Google Patents and esp@cenet.

When asked to rank desirable features of patent databases, librarians overwhelming (87.2%) suggested multi-page saving/printing of patent documents and (74.4%) making PDF the standard format. Other popular features included patent classification search tools and the ability to download/save search results.

The complete results of the survey are available at http://hdl.handle.net/1974/1377.

Patent Buddy Ranks Patent Attorneys

Patent Buddy is a new service that provides data (obtained from the USPTO) on registered patent attorneys and their employment histories since 2001. It claims to have data on 38,669 attorneys from ~13,000 organizations. You can search by name, registration #, organization, and geographic location. (You can search by Canadian city and postal code but not province, although it appears that provinces eventually will be added.)

Each individual is given an experience ranking, although it's unclear how this is calculated. You can also see their employment history, patents (although none I viewed listed any) and co-workers. Each organization is ranked by growth curve and experience. Again... details are sketchy about how the rankings are calculated.

More information is available in an article in Finance and Commerce, a Minneapolis-based business journal.

It's a very interesting start-up with a lot of potential... I think it would be especially useful to independent inventors and small firms shopping for a patent firm, and new patent attorneys job hunting.

Speedo's New Swimsuit Big Winner in Beijing

Speedo's new swimsuit, called the Fastskin LZR Racer, is grabbing attention at the Beijing Olympics. Two recently published US patent applications, US20080141431 and US20080141430, may reveal the technical secrets behind the innovative design that some say is responsible for the record-breaking performances of swimmers such as Michael Phelps of the US.

Inventors have been improving swimsuits for well over a hundred years, some less successful than others, as shown by this example from the 19th century. (US243834)

2008 World Patent Report

The World Intellectual Property Organization has released its 2008 World Patent Report. The 72-page report provides a statistical overview of worldwide patent activity, including the number of patent filings, granted patents, patent families, patents in force, patents by field of technology and the cost of patenting.

Proofreading Patents May Save Big $$$

The USPTO published more than 480,000 patent documents in 2007, so it isn't surprising that a few of them contain errors. Last year the PTO issued 23,000 certificates of correction (CCs), or about 12.5% of all issued patents. CCs are issued to correct typographical errors and other minor defects. However, a recent article citing a study published in the India Business Law Journal suggests that the number of defective patents is much, much higher and that uncorrected errors can be an expensive headache for patent owners. Unfortunately, CCs are not searchable in the USPTO website, although the scanned CC is appended to the original patent. CCs are also announced in the USPTO's Official Gazette.

Inventor's Last Wish: Bury me in my invention.

WIPO Magazine reports about the final wish of inventor Frederic Baur, a food chemist for Procter and Gamble. In 1966 Baur applied for a patent on a container for Pringles potato chips (US348798). Baur died in May at the age of 89 and requested that his body be cremated and his ashes buried in a Pringles can. I wonder if it was regular or Ranch flavoured?

Youngest Patent Holder?

The current issue of WIPO Magazine features a story about a boy who may be the world's youngest patent holder. Samuel Thomas Houghton of Buxton, UK was only three years old when he had an idea for an improved broom. His father, a patent attorney, applied for a GB patent, which was granted on April 2, 2008 (GB2438091).

It's impossible to know for sure if little Sammy is the world's youngest inventor since the inventor's age is not usually stated in patent applications. But I can think of at least one other very young patent holder from Minnesota. Steven Olson of St. Paul, MN, also the son of a patent attorney, was granted a patent in 2002 for a new "method of swinging on a swing" (US6368227). I believe that little Stevie was only 4 or 5 when his father applied for his patent. His patent is often cited by critics of the USPTO as an example of a low quality patent that should never have been issued. It does look like a vanity project, given that it's hard to imagine how one would go about commercializing such an invention. I guess it's no surprise that he let it expire in 2006.

Using RF to Treat Cancer

Last night Sixty Minutes did an interesting story on an inventor named John Kanzius who has developed a new radiofrequency therapy to treat tumors and cancerous cells. Kanzius, who has no technical or medical training, was inspired to invent by his fight with leukemia, a disease which still threatens to take his life. Kanzius has at least five US patent applications under review: 20050251233, 20050251234, 20050273143, 20060190063, and 20070250139. His earliest provisional application was filed on May 7, 2004. He also has two published EP applications and two PCT applications.

The treatment involves injecting a tumor with gold nanoparticles and exposing them to RF, which causes the cancerous cells to heat up and die. Adjacent cells are not harmed. The therapy has shown encouraging results in the lab, much to the amazement and delight of canceer researchers.

It just so happens that I am currently reading Margaret Cheney's excellent 1981 biography of Nikola Tesla, Tesla, Man Out of Time. Tesla was an early pioneer of wireless communication in the 1880s and 1890s and believed in the possibility of wireless transmission of electricity. He also speculated that radiofrequency waves might be used to treat human disease, although he never followed up on the idea. I think it's fascinating that more than one hundred years later someone might actually fulfill Tesla's vision.

Transparency in the US Patent System

An op-ed piece in the July 14th Wall Street Journal by L. Gordon Crovitz makes an interesting case about the shortcomings of the US patent system and the recent failure of Congress to enact patent reform. One of his criticisms is the lack of transparency in the system. This may seem odd given the amount of patent information that is available in public databases. Surely the public has never had better access to the latest patent information? Well, actually...

Although the USPTO was a leader among patent offices in publishing patent data on the web in the mid-1990s, over the past decade it hasn't invested much in its core patent databases, PatFT and AppFT. PatFT contains issued patents from 1790 to the present and AppFT contains published applications from 2001 forward. Creating a separate database for published applications may have made sense from an internal bureaucratic, ah...administrative, point of view, but it's a huge disadvantage to searchers because it forces them to do double the work. Almost every type of patent search, from a patentability search to a state-of-the-art search, must include both issued patents and published applications. Other third-party public databases such as esp@cenet, FreePatentsOnline and Patent Lens, allow users to search both types of documents at the same time.

Most patent offices publish patent documents in PDF format, but the USPTO still insists on using TIFF, an obscure format that is loathed by searchers because it requires them to install a special browser plugin such as AlternaTIFF or InterTIFF. And the USPTO still does not allow printing or saving multipage documents, forcing users to go to esp@cenet, which enabled multi-page downloads in 2004, or a third-party service like Pat2PDF, in order to download complete US documents. The USPTO allows does not allow exporting patent bibliographic data, which would be very useful for creating databases or spreadsheets for analysis purposes.

One of the biggest impediments to transparency is the fact that there is no central access point on the USPTO website to patent information. Patent documents, classification, status information, ownership, and post-grant actions are scattered in at least a half dozen systems and channels. For example, the USPTO publishes notices about expired patents, corrections, reexamination filings, reissue applications in the electronic Official Gazette, a weekly periodical that was first published (in print) in 1872. Even though the print edition was discontinued in favor of the electronic in 2002, the format of these notices has not really changed in more than fifty years. Although the OG is searchable back to 1995, it would be much more convenient to make this data available in the PatFT database and allow users to create RSS or e-mail alerts for individual patents. Users who want to check on the ownership status of a patent or published application must use the Assignments on the Web database. Users who want to view the contents of a file wrapper must use the PAIR system. Neither system is connected to the PatFT or AppFT databases.

So while the public has much better access to US patent information than it did 15 years ago, it is still very difficult to find given that it is locked up in so many different silos and stovepipes on the USPTO website. The end result is a very fragmented, user-unfriendly system that effectively hides important information.

Classification Order 1878 - Class 16, Misc. Hardware and Class 52, Buildings

The USPTO has issued a new classification order, #1878, covering changes to Classes 16, Miscellaneous Hardware, and 52, Static Structures (Buildings). Static structures include all types of constructions ranging from amusement park rides and sports stadiums to wind turbines and gravestones. The principal changes in Class 52 affect subclasses related to beams, columns, girders, shafts, reinforcing bars and rods. As of July 1, there are approximately 92,500 patents and 10,600 published applications classified in Class 52.

Medical Innovators: Michael E. Debakey

Dr. Michael DeBakey, a heart surgeon who invented dozens of medical procedures, devices and instruments, died this weekend at age 99 after a extremely long and productive career. (He continued practicing medicine well into his 90s.) While in medical school in the 1930s, he devised a device called a roller pump that eventually would become a core technology in heart-lung machines. Although Dr. Debakey is recognized for many innovations, he only patented a few inventions, including a rotary blood pump in 1999. (US5947892)

Other American medical innovators include Dr. John Gibbon, inventor of the heart-lung machine (US2,702,035) and Forrest M. Bird, inventor of the first low-cost medical respirator in the world. (US3,068,856)

Patenting medical procedures and devices is controversial. Some countries, such as Canada, ban patents for medical therapies. In the 1950s, the American Medical Association lobbied to extend patent protection to medical treatments but as recently as 1995, it condemned doctors who sought to patent certain medical procedures.

Researchers See Patent Quality in Rising Citation Counts

Joff Wild, a journalist and blogger for Intellectual Asset Management Magazine, makes some interesting observations about a new study that claims that the quality of patents issued by the USPTO is rising. The research found, among other things, significant growth in prior art citations in issued patents over the last five years: 41 percent more US patent docs, 36 percent more foreign patent docs and 23 percent more non-patent literature. Wild points out that this research contradicts claims that US patent examiners frequently miss relevant prior art and issue low-quality patents. The research was published in the June issue of Les Nouvelles, the official publication of the Licensing Executives Society (LES).