Last panel: Patent databases: FFII contributes to software patent information (2004-11-09)
[ Patent Databases | BXL Conference 04-11-09 | Gauss | About Gauss project | Carsten Svaneborg ]
"Google is the new Gutenberg!", therefore there is demand to have patent documents accessible via Google.
Patents documents at Espacenet (official EPO patent database) are distributed in large pdf files. Large-image !PDFs are useless for presentation and searching, because they take long time to load, and they need to be OCR'ed before the text can be analysed, and FFII doubts that OCR'ing is a very precise operation. Better to the text directly from v3.espacenet.com in ascii. FFII president Hartmut Pilch said he thinks EPO's pdf pratice is because of deals with proprietary patent information services, so there is no incentive for the EPO to provide a usable system. Patent writings are "public domain".
FFII provides a own text patent database named "Gauss". This database serves to make patents more accessable to public understanding. We use open databases, statistics and screening. The reason is that EPO currently does not distiguish business or logical methods from real world inventions. In reality, the real world values of EPO change from case to case, and in our experience are leading to broad patents. This will cause trouble for anyone beeing inventive, rather than the oposite. So we nead a broader approach than keywords to understand the effects.
What is relevant is that the public can access examples of software patents, and can monitor the progress of these through the patent system. (who gets them, which contries dominate, how long from publication to grant etc.) Not that the documents we display are entirely exact.
Gauss features Wiki style voting, community system
- Statistics about broader patents
- Search tools that work (e.g. Google) (and internal)
- Getting the information public
- Classifications using statistical filters
- Indicies (wiki)
- Patent-rankings (best/worst)
Have a look at the FFII software patent database
Related Workshop
Opening the EPO cabinet: Samples and statistics how different directive texts define the scope of patentability (16h45-18h00)
Jozef Halbersztadt, Polish Patent Office
Jonas Bosson, Illuminet AB
Hartmut Pilch, FFII
