[okfn-discuss] Open Patents [was Re: Proposal for OpenThesis Project]

Tue Jul 13 13:15:44 UTC 2010

No, I'm not suggesting another project! but this discussion came up in the
context of Open Thesis and it may be worth discussing as an open issue it
its own right

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Ed Summers <ehs at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 1:40 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> > Patents are actually the easiest place to start with. The info is by
> > definition Open. We have a program which downloads all the EPO patents
> for
> > chemistry and indexes them. We think it's miles ahead of any other
> > technology. It's not 100%. So we can create an open patents database.
> (No,
> > I'm not proposing TWO OKF projects in the same day - I believe that if
> you
> > propose something you have to be part of the heavy lifting and I'll do
> that
> > for theses)
>
> I'm not sure if it's relevant but Google and the US Patent Office
> recently (well last month) announced the availability of bulk
> downloads for patent and trademark data [1,2].
>
> //Ed
>
> [1] http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2010/10_22.jsp
> [2] http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto.html
>

I've looked very briefly and it appears that the USPTO used to sell its
patents (or at least a fee-based access) whereas the EPO makes them freely
and I think Openly available. The release appears to suggest that Google
will make them "freely" available but I don't know what the re-use would be.
This could be a useful area for someone in OKF to investigate and report on
(I think an index of Openness would be a useful service).

To clarify - I personally will not be pursuing very much in patents but we
do have crawlers for EPO and also tools for detailed information extraction
for chemical patents.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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