| Hi -
FYI, definitely worth grabbing a copy for yourselves. In theory (and I'm not vouching for this) the service will continue and will expand to about 70 tbytes of patent data, no strings attached. I was not involved in the provisioning of this service and do not have a copy of the data. I've been in touch with Orwant, and I believe the intent is right on this one. Fingers crossed, but make a copy anyway.
Carl Begin forwarded message: Date: June 2, 2010 11:55:35 AM PDT
Subject: From Google: Free Bulk Data from US Patent and Trademark Office
Hi there,
Google has just announced that we’ve
worked with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to
provide bulk patent and trademark data to the public, for free. Until
now, USPTO’s public data in bulk form has been provided solely as a
fee-based service. You can read more online from the USPTO’s press release and Google’s public policy blog (text below).
Please
feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Best wishes,
Jake
--
Jake Hubert
Global Communications and Public Affairs
Google, Inc.
Direct: 650-214-5273
Mobile: 650-488-4807
Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager
When we launched Google Patent Search in 2006, we wanted to make it easier for people to understand the world of inventions, whether they were browsing for curious patents or researching serious engineering. Recently, we’ve also worked on a number of public data search features, as well as experimental features like the Public Data Explorer.
There are many places to search for individual patents -- the US Patent and Trademark Office
and Google Patent Search are two examples. But sometimes that’s not
enough. If you’re trying to identify trends in innovation over time or
analyze all the patents relevant to your invention, it helps to have
all the patent data on hand. For example, the non-profit Cambia’s PatentLens creates
topical analyses of patent information, and they can only do this with
a comprehensive data set. Others have experimented with a variety of
online mashups of the data, such as an interactive map showing the most innovative states.
The
trouble is, that’s a lot of information -- terabytes of it -- and in
the past the only way to deliver that information was on DVDs and other
physical media. The USPTO will ship them to you,
and over the last decade Cambia alone has spent hundreds of thousands
of dollars on this data. But with high-bandwidth connections on the
rise, both the USPTO and Google think it’s time to help people download
the bulk data directly.
That’s why we’re proud to announce that the USPTO and Google are making this data available for free at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto.html.
This includes all granted patents and trademarks, and published
applications -- with both full text and images. And in the future we
will be making more data available including file histories and related
data.
We look forward to continuing to work with the USPTO and
other public organizations to expand access to public data. You can
read the official press release from the USPTO here.
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