Legal Research

Wikipedia References in Issued Patents

Posted on January 01, 2008
Back in September 2006 the USPTO banned patent examiners from using Wikipedia as a source of prior art information, citing its unreliability and lack of authority. Well, this apparently hasn't stopped examiners or inventors from citing the popular online encyclopedia in patents...

U.S. Patent and PGPub Year-End Review

Posted on December 30, 2007
2007 was a bit of a mixed bag for U.S. patents and published applications. In Q4 the USPTO published 73,450 applications, the lowest number in more than a year and a 3 percent drop from the same quarter in 2006. However, the total number of PGPubs for the calendar year was 300,198, a 1...

Canadians Too Lazy to Invent?

Posted on December 29, 2007
A recent op-ed in the Globe and Mail (Dec. 27) uses patent statistics to make the case that Canada, in general, and the province of Alberta, specifically, needs to focus more on math, science and the creative arts in schools in order to ensure future prosperity...

E-Documents as Prior Art

Posted on December 19, 2007
Wynn Coggins, director for the USPTO's Group 3620 (Electronic Commerce), has written an article called "When is an Electronic Document a Printed Publication for Prior Art Purposes?

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New Report: Patents per 100K Workers, 2001-2006

Posted on December 19, 2007
The State Science and Technology Institute (SSTI), a nonprofit organization that supports economic development through science, technology and innovation, has released a new report showing the ranking in number of patents issued per 100,000 workers for U...

EPO Survey: esp@cenet Exporting Function

Posted on December 19, 2007
The EPO is conducting a survey on a proposed improvement to esp@cenet scheduled for 2008. Specifically, they're asking for feedback on the usefulness of exporting data in CSV or XML formats. Currently, the only patent office database (that I'm aware of) that supports exporting is the German PTO's DEPATISnet...

Dutch Six-Year Patent Will End in 2008

Posted on December 14, 2007
The Netherlands Patent Office has announced that it will phase out its six-year patent (C1 document) in 2008. The six-year patent is a weaker form of patent protection than the standard 20-year patent. An application for a six-year patent is automatically registered without a novelty search or examination 18 months after filing...

Obama Promises More Transparency for Patent System

Posted on December 14, 2007
According to a story last month in the World Information Review, presidential candidate Barack Obama would make patent reform a top priority of his administration. One of his ideas is to open up the patent process to citizen input, which I assume would entail establishing a formal patent review program similar to the Community Patent Review Project being piloted by the New York Law School...

Inventors Hit the Links

Posted on December 13, 2007
I'm not a golfer but I know that golf is one of the world's most popular sports. According to the PGA website, there are 25 million amateur golfers in the U.S. alone. This huge multi-billion dollar industry is fertile ground for inventors seeking to cash in on golfers' legendary passion for anything that promises to improve their game or ease their journey across the fareway...

Big News in Patent Information Land

Posted on November 30, 2007
Joe Ebersole, founder and chief counsel for the Coalition for Patent and Trademark Information Dissemination, died on Oct. 18 in Washington, D.C. There's a brief obit in the December issue of Information Today (not yet available online) and the Washington Post (10/21)...

Plant Patents & Canadian Pears

Posted on November 04, 2007
Plant patents rarely make the news, so I was delighted to see a story in this weekend's Globe and Mail about a new type of pear cultivated by a team of Canadian scientists. The pear, which is known only by the designation "HW614", is a cross between several types of pears including the familiar Bartletts...

U.S. Patent Counts, July-Sept. 2007

Posted on November 04, 2007
Quarterly Patent and PGPub CountsQ1 || 47,332 | 74,277 | 121,609Q2 || 45,828 | 76,640 | 122,468Q3 || 44,567 | 75,831 | 120,398Q4 ||The third quarter of 2007 was relatively unremarkable with both patents (utility, design reissue and plant) and published applications experiencing a slight decline from the previous quarter...

Google Patents Delivers 2007 Patents

Posted on October 30, 2007
Patent searchers have been wondering for months when Google would update Google Patents, its database of U.S. patents launched in mid-2006. Although the USPTO publishes up to 10,000 new patent documents per week, Google Patents hasn't been updated since it was launched some sixteen months ago...

Chemical Structure Searching in Free Patent Databases?

Posted on October 25, 2007
The ability to search chemical compounds in public patent databases has always been very limited. Unlike commercial databases such as SciFinder Scholar, public patent databases have not offered tools for searching compounds by structure or formula. Nor do they include dictionaries of chemical synonyms...

Most Prolific Inventors

Posted on October 25, 2007
Contrary to popular opinion, Thomas Edison is not the world's most prolific inventor. So says technology writer Kevin Maney in the November issue of Condé Nast Portfolio. Although Edison received an impressive 1,093 U.S. patents during his lifetime, Maney has uncovered at least three living inventors, including one American, who beat Edison's record...

Baby Products, Patent Numbers and a Puzzle

Posted on September 20, 2007
My wife and I are going to be new parents any day now, so our house has been filling up with all kinds of cool baby-related products. (We're having twins, so that means two of everything.) Of course, I can't resist examing all these amazing products for patent numbers...

2007 Lasker Awards

Posted on September 19, 2007
The 2007 Lasker Awards, sometimes called "America's Nobels", were announced on Sept. 15. The Lasker Award for Outstanding Basic Medical Research was awarded to Dr. Steinman of Rockefellar University for his discovery of dendritic cells, a type of immune cell that plays a key role in the immune systems of humans and other mammals...

New USPC Classification Orders

Posted on September 16, 2007
The USPTO has recently issued several new classification orders affecting Classes 375 (Pulse or Digital Communications), 386 (Television Signal Processing for Dynamic Recording or Reproduction) and 525 (Synthetic Resins or Rubbers).

WIPO Proposes Supplementary International Patent Search

Posted on September 12, 2007
The WIPO General Assembly is likely to approve a supplementary international patent search, according to comments made by WIPO Deputy Director Francis Gurry quoted in IP Watch. This will allow applicants to request a supplemental search from another patent office other than a designated international search authority...

Downloading Foreign Patents

Posted on September 10, 2007
When I need to download a copy of a patent for myself or a client, I usually go right to esp@cenet. Since esp@cenet includes ~60 million patent documents from more than 70 countries, the odds of finding a patent or at least a family member are very good...

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