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Author Archives: mjwhitekingston
Obama Promises More Transparency for Patent System
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Obama, Patent reform, Politics
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Inventors Hit the Links
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 … Continue reading
Posted in fore inventors only, golf
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Big News in Patent Information Land
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 … Continue reading
Plant Patents & Canadian Pears
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 … Continue reading
Posted in plant patents
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U.S. Patent Counts, July-Sept. 2007
Quarterly Patent and PGPub Counts Q1 || 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) … Continue reading
Posted in Patent statistics
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Google Patents Delivers 2007 Patents
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Google patents, Patent databases
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Chemical Structure Searching in Free Patent Databases?
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 … Continue reading
Most Prolific Inventors
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 … Continue reading
Posted in inventors, Patent statistics
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Baby Products, Patent Numbers and a Puzzle
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 … Continue reading
Posted in patent numbers, South Africa, trademarks
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2007 Lasker Awards
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Lasker awards, medical devices
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Patent Librarian's Notebook 