Richard Garner

At the time, some commentators suggested that this explosion in free patent information would come at the expense of the commercial vendors and looked forward to a “new democracy” in patent searching. Others feared that the rise of the free services would lead to a reduction in quality or among choice of vendors. Neither prediction has come true. If anything, there appear to me more “for profit” patent databases available now than ever before giving users considerable choice of data coverage, search functionality, user interfaces and data export options etc. So why and how are commercial databases continuing to thrive given the ubiquity of free patent information and can the two models co-exist?