Dissemination’s the thing
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
The fundamental purpose of our patent system, of course, is to encourage disclosure of new ideas. Contrary to what many believe, the system’s not there to make inventors (or patent attorneys) rich. Nope. It’s there to encourage our best and brightest to share their secrets with the world.
Disclosure is nothing, though, without effective dissemination. For society to reap maximum benefit from the patent system, it must include a means for effectively disseminating all the great information that it collects.
We don’t hear about it much, but this dissemination side of the equation is so important that our Patent Act squarely places responsibility for it on the Patent and Trademark Office:
“The United States Patent and Trademark Office…shall be responsible for disseminating to the public information with respect to patents….” (35 U.S.C. 2)
Unfortunately, from society’s point of view, the current PTO administration seems to have lost sight of this responsibility. Indeed, two recent actions show a downright disregard for it.
First, on January 1, 2008, the Office terminated its “USPTO Direct” programming interface that allowed independent software programs to interface with PAIR, the public patent application information retrieval system. Users of the popular Partridge program, which was created by original patent-tech mastermind Carl Oppedahl, felt the effects of this first hand as the program went dark on the first of the year.
To make matters worse, the Office has apparently decided to keep the details of the successor interface (assuming one exists) to itself despite Carl’s personal efforts to educate the PAIR team on the need for and importance of publicly available documentation. As Carl accurately points out, this secretive approach is an innovation killer because future “arbitrary fiddling” with the interface by the Office “could make a ten-thousand-dollar piece of software into an expensive paperweight.”
(The irony here is amazing. The Office, charged with the responsibility of disseminating patent-based information, is actively discouraging innovation in the field by eschewing that responsibility in favor of more secretive approaches.)
The New Year ushered in another undocumented change that affected me a little closer to home. Suddenly and, as far as I can tell, without notice, the Office stopped placing the text files of Official Gazette Notices on the public ftp server. Prior to this change, I had been using this data, week in and week out, to place notices on FizzDisplay pages of expired patents on PatentFizz. Worse yet, I had just put the finishing touches on a new PatentFizz feature that allows users to search patents that had recently expired for failure to pay maintenance fees (can you say intervening rights?).
I could, of course, recreate the scripts that grab the expiration information using the new eOG:P (is that a name or an emoticon?), but I don’t feel like buying one of Carl’s paperweights right now.
So these efforts are dead in the water now thanks to this abrupt and unexplained change by the Office. I’ve read the Notice published in the Federal Register on December 26 (.pdf) regarding a change in the publication format for OG Notices at least a dozen times. For the life of me, though, I can’t tell if the mumbo jumbo language in that Notice says anything about the good ‘ole text files that I had grown to love. Even if it can be read to give Notice of this change, it’s nothing short of absurb that the Office published it five days before implementing the change.
These two incidents - the Pair programming interface and the Gazette Notice text files - are, unfortunately, just the latest negatives in the now well-established track record of the Dudas administration. In just a few short years, Dudas and Co. have completely dismantled the sense of partnership that existed between the Office and the bar when I started practicing.
It’s sad, really. Today’s web 2.0 world makes it easy to build tools that help disseminate all kinds of patent-based information to the public in new and interesting ways. Inexplicably, though, the current administration seems heck-bent on killing such efforts. I wouldn’t mind this so much if Dudas & Co. took their dissemination responsibility seriously, but clearly they don’t.
