Posts Tagged: "patent data"

Data Mining Lessons Applied to Analyzing Patent Documents

Recently, we have seen two examples where the use of patent analytics have had a significant impact on the economic valuation of a collection of patents. The first involved a doubling of the value of RIM’s patent portfolio by a major Canadian bank after it was mentioned as having a stand-out portfolio in a patent study. The second involved the analysis of AOL patent assets where two different sets of analytics provided very different results. In the AOL case, when it came to the eventual purchase by Microsoft, one of the valuations matched almost exactly the price that was paid. Both of these cases demonstrate how important well thought out analytics are to providing signals of value when working with patents.

The PTO Paradox: A Gatekeeper Mired in the Past

I believe it is time for the PTO to jump aboard the ship of the future and use document and data search techniques now being employed in the litigation and national security arenas. Many tools (software approaches) exist that multiply effort and get smarter with each go around. I believe these tools should have a place at the PTO. Search techniques that build on what others have done and that search not just publications, but file histories as well, would give examiners a leg up when trying to assess patentability and truly understand what references can and should be cited to demonstrate. Machine translation of foreign language art would also be very useful. The abstracts just do not provide enough for an Examiner to go on for foreign references. And, in many areas, foreign art is the best.

USPTO and Google to Make Patent & Trademark Data Public

If you visit the Google bulk USPTO data site you will see that the data, volumes of it, is presented in zip format. Thus, the data will not likely be at all useful to individual users, but perhaps other commercial services will be able to finally access the data and create usable products. I say this because as good as Google is for many things it seems pretty clear to me that Google gets a project only so far before they lose interest, move on to whatever is next and leave an 80% solution behind. I have seen this over and over again with Google. As good and quick as Google Patents is, for example, it lacks easy to provide and fundamentally important features and is, therefore, not that useful.