PatentScope now offers a mobile search interface. As far as I know, this is the first patent office database optimized for mobile devices.
Also read that WIPO is planning to add “the bulk” of patent data from the IP5 patent offices, e.g. EPO, USPTO, JPO, SIPO and KIPO, to PatentScope in 2011. The EPO data was added a couple of months ago.
This will be a great addition to an already excellent tool.
A couple of weeks ago I gave a brief update on patent search tool developments at the Chemistry Librarians’ Workshop at the University of Toronto. One of the topics I covered was the recent addition of Markush searching in SciFinder. I’m still trying to figure out how to promote this powerful tool to faculty and grad students, most of whom are not too keen on reading patent documents.
The first rule of inventing might be: no matter how commonplace a device is, someone will always think of a way to improve it. Take, for example, award-winning industrial designer Larry Laske’s new beach chair. It’s basically a chair backrest molded in plastic with two spikes to anchor it in the sand. Laske filed a U.S. application in 2004 and was awarded a patent in 2007 (7178875B2). According to the patent, Laske’s intent was to create a chair that is “lightweight, easy to carry and simple to use.” You can buy them in blue, green, yellow and orange on Laske’s website www.beachthingy.com. With the exception of the elimination of one of the handholds, the finished product is identical to the patent drawing.
The beach chair has been reinvented many times over. One of the earliest patents, which the patent examiner cited in his review, was issued in 1919 (1312774).
The European Patent Office is now publishing a monthly report on changes to the European Classification system (ECLA). ECLA has about 140,000 sub-classes, making it on par with the US Patent Classification. Changes are grouped in three categories: Added, Deleted and Updated. The reports are available at http://www.epo.org/searching/essentials/classification/ecla/changes.html.
Interesting story in IP Frontline about the development of a common classification scheme by the EPO and USPTO. The project is one of ten joint initiatives announced last year by the USPTO, EPO, JPO, KIPO and SIPO. (See the Five IP Offices website). Initial planning is well underway at the EPO and USPTO, but that most of the work will be done in 2012-13. According to the report, the USPTO will abolish its own classification system when the new common system is operational.
Syracuse University Library’s Plastics Collection is a great source of information on all things plastic from the late 1800s to the present. Many objects in the collection have patent references.
Since an estimated 2 billion people will watch Prince William marry Kate Middleton tomorrow, I thought a royal wedding themed patent story was in order.
Flowers play a prominent role in weddings, so I searched for plant patents named for members of the royal family. Sure enough, in 1987, Thomas Watson of Wisconsin received three plant patents for varieties of Amelanchier, a shrub, which he named in honor of Prince Charles (PP6,039), Princess Diana (PP6,041) and Prince William (PP6,040).
Lowell Hoy of Indiana patented a new variety of rose named “Lady Diana” (PP5,360) in 1983.
And in 1999, Robin Marks of Aylesbury, UK filed a plant patent application (2001/0100101) for a dahlia variety named Diana, Princess of Wales.
There are no plant patents named in honor of Kate Middleton, but I suspect that we’ll be seeing some soon.
In the first quarter of 2011 the USPTO issued 62,132 patents, an increase of 1.7 percent from the previous quarter and 11.9 percent from the same period last year. The number of published applications declined by 4 percent from the previous quarter and was essentially unchanged from a year ago.
The USPTO is fast approaching its 8 millionth utility patent, which is likely to be issued in the second half of the year, probably in August. Patent 7,000,000, for a new type of polysaccharide fiber, was issued five years ago on February 14, 2006 to Dupont.
Patent No. 6,000,000 was granted on December 7, 1999 to inventors Jeff Hawkins and Michael Albanese. Their invention was a system for synchronizing files on two computers, the core technology of the Palm Pilot PDA, the first commercially successful hand-held electronic organizer. Palm was purchased by H-P for about $1.2 billion in 2010.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the first published patent application on March 15, 2001. Since that date the USPTO has published approximately 2,706,056 utility and plant patent applications. Published applications now account for about 30 percent of all U.S. patent documents.
Table 1. Quarterly Patent Document Counts*
2011 ….. Patents (B) ….. PGPubs (A) ….. Total (A + B)
Q1 ….. 62,132 ….. 78,481 ….. 140,613
*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 Mar. 31, 2011
Utility patents ….. 7,861,317 – 7,917,966 (56,331)
Reissues ….. RE42,020 – RE42,264 (243)
PGPubs ….. 2011/0000001 – 2011/0078,838 (78,481)
Designs ….. D629,996 – D635,325 (5,326)
Plants …… PP20,816 – PP21,833 (18)
SIRs ….. H2,251-H2,252 (2)
Today’s Globe and Mail published an interesting list of 24 cities ranked by the number of U.S. patents per 100,000 population. The top ranked Canadian city was Vancouver (11th), followed by Toronto (12th), Calgary (13th), Montreal (15th) and Halifax (20th). Seven of the top ten cities were in the U.S. There were some surprising omissions. Houston, for example, didn’t make the list despite its high patent output. And San Diego and the Research Triangle area in North Carolina, home to many research universities and biotech companies, were also missing.
It’s easy to dismiss such rankings as U.S.-centric because they’re based only on USPTO data. But the fact is that many Canadian inventors and companies file applications first in the U.S. According to the USPTO’s Fiscal Year 2010 annual report, Canadians filed 11,250 applications in 2009. In comparison, the CIPO received 5,215 patent applications from Canadian residents in 2009-2010.
It would be interesting to re-calculate this list based on PCT data from PatentScope. Cities with high filings of PCT patent applications per 100K pop. might indicate concentrations of companies with global rather than national or regional patent strategies.
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.
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