Putting all patents and trademarks on-line costs
about $250,000/year. We understand that the government is sometimes
challenged when it comes to operating effectively, so we're willing
to concede that this might cost USPTO $1 million per year. Here's how we're going to do it for a lot less if they the Patent Office doesn't get cracking.
Bruce Lehman, "We'd do this tomorrow if
we had the funding," Mr. Lehman said. "What Mr. Malamud
wants us to do is to permit people to download the entire database.
If he can do that, we'd be out all $20 million we now receive
in fees," he said. "Why would anyone want paper?"
New York Times, May 4, 1998, John Markoff, U.S. is Urged to Offer
More Data on Line, p. D6. The Paperwork Reduction Act prohibits
making a profit on the data, but that's another story.
Let's put these numbers in perspective. The U.S.
Patent Office will receive a total of $836 million in revenues
for FY 1999, of which $38 million is for the "Information
Dissemination Business." Source: USPTO Corporate Plan in Brief
Commissioner Lehman thinks he will loose all
$20 million per year if he "gives away" "his"
database. The experience of the Securities and Exchange Commission
was that they actually made more money because the market for
their data got much bigger. After all, even if the "free"
data is on the Internet, a serious corporate information retailer
will still want to buy the bulk feed from the Patent Office in
some convenient format such as a set of DVDs.
How important are patents and trademarks to U.S.
corporations? The International Trade Administration estimates
that U.S. corporations receive three times as much money from
foreign corporations in patent and trademark licensing fees as
they pay. This is a $22 billion year trade surplus for U.S. exports
of intellectual property. Summary statistics see International
Trade Administration Summary Statistics. Transactions
by area, see the Bureau of Economic Analysis, International Accounts Data.
Let's step back a minute. Patents and trademarks
are the lynchpins of our intellectual property markets, which
in turn support our high technology industry. The National Science
Foundation estimates that U.S. trade in technology products accounted
for 17 to 19 percent of all U.S. trade. In 1994, total U.S. trade
with other countries was $1.2 trillion, $219 billion of which
involved high technology products." See National
Science Foundation, "U.S. Trade in Advanced Technology"
The Secretary of Commerce, the President, and
the Vice President all tout the benefits of an ecommerce bridge
to the next millennium. See Secretary Daley's The Emerging Digital Economy.:
"governments do have a role to play in supporting the creation
of a predictable legal environments globally for doing business
on the Internet, but must exercise this role in a non-bureaucratic
fashion." The Secretary thinks that the ecommerce world is
worth $300 billion year to U.S. business by the year 2002.
Commissioner Lehman estimates that in FY 1999,
they will serve 1.5 million information customers, by which he
means "a transaction for a person on a day" or what
we would call a "hit." Now, we don't mean to be disrespectful,
but there are high school students with web sites that serve that
number of people. To give a benchmark, the Securities and Exchange
Commission is doing 500,000 hits per day. By way of comparison,
there are over 2 million science and engineering students in the
United States and over 7 million people make their day-to-day
living as scientists or engineers. Source: NSF.
Estimated number of pages on the web: 300 million.
Number of pages public.resource.org added July 4, 1998: 5 million
Number of pages public.resource.org has promised to add by July 4, 1999: 50 million
Number of Congressional Resolutions to make July 4, 1999 "Patent Independence Day": 0
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