The PTO makes available to the public the PAIR database, Patent
Application Information Retreival database, which is a brief record of
all of the events (and when they occured) for an issued patent - date
of Office Actions and processing events inside the PTO. If you haven't
used it, the site is http://pair.uspto.gov.
Unfortunately, you have to download data for patents one-by-one,
making it pretty much impossible to do any sort of statistical analysis
of the timing of events in patent applications (I am interested in
doing a study of the statistics of First Office Actions over the last
twenty years, a measure of patent quality).
A short time ago, I wrote to the PTO under the Freedom of Information
Act, asking to be provided at cost with a copy of all of the data for
the 1976 to 2000 time period. I figured the could just dump the Web data
onto some CDROMs and charge me for that.
Apparently, it will take them more work to do so, and want a few more
bucks:
Extensive computer programming and run time would be necessary
to extract the publicly available PAIR data from the PALM
database and process it for release in the format you have
requested. You would be responsible for the computer search
cost for such preparation. 37 CFR 102.11(c). The fee to
process your request, including computer programming and
computer time is estimated at $26,000.
Adding a few grand just in case, I figure it will cost me $30,000 to get
the raw data so I can do my quality. A bit pricey, but such is life.
Anyway, I don't care about patent quality that much to spend $30K of my
own money, and would be interested in getting one or more companies to
join in and help share the costs (like most of it). I figure some of
you on PIUG work for companies or information suppliers that could make
use of the raw data and/or my analysis results. Additionally, I assume
we are free to distribute the data to anyone, so it could be some
community effort. If nothing else, the data will allow you to analyze
some of how your competitors apply for patents.
So if any of you are interested, please let me know.
Thanks,
Greg Aharonian
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 10 2001 - 15:59:03 EDT