Re: AW: IBM website subscription

Gregory Aharonian (srctran@world.std.com)
Mon, 8 Feb 1999 15:00:19 -0500

>How shall national patent offices react? Is there a risk for the
>consumer of patent information that IBM (or others) could stop its
>initiative? ......

What makes most economic and logistic sense to me is for all of the
national patent offices around the world, under the sponsorship of
WIPO, to create and maintain one joint patent information database
(with reflectors around the world). Patent information distribution
is one of the reason governments and inventors pay money to paetnt
offices, and given the confidentiality concerns about patent
searching, I prefer to see as much as this as possible out of the
hands of nongovernment entities.

Greg Aharonian