The Invent Blog®

One of my favorite quotes is:

The … right to criticize either by temperate reasoning, or by immodest and indecent invective, … is the ultimate source of (citizens’) authority. –Judge Learned Hand

That being said, I was thrilled to see Matt Buchanan’s new “opinions” page on his blog where he speaks his piece. For instance, in his latest post he tackles the USPTO’s recent incidents of limiting (or at least making less accessible) public data. Another example is the addition of the verification code in Public PAIR.

I presume* the USPTO took those actions to deal with a few data/bandwidth abusers, but am not thrilled that the data is less accessible to legitimate use by the public (and practitioners) than it used to be. One bad apple…

[*I say "presume" because I haven't seen a public explanation posted anywhere (let me know if I missed it) from the USPTO explaining why they are changing things. Need to know basis, I guess...]

Crikey, I’ve been updating this blog for four years now?

[First Post]

Oh, how the patent blogging landscape has changed since then. When I started the blog, I would post on any and everything patent related that I could find…lawsuits, new Federal Circuit cases, funny “TGIF” posts…whatever caught my eye that day. Over the next few weeks-months, Buchanan’s blog, Sorocco’s blog, Crouch’s blog (and other patent blogs) came on the scene. Each new patent blog finding its own niche, pushing the others to find their own niches too. The diversity of patent blogs right now is astounding…and I’ve had a great time getting to know my fellow authors, making some amazing friends in the process.

I’ve really enjoyed the past four years…here’s to the next four! Thanks for reading!

One of the best parts of blogging is having your own personal “knowledge management” system…so you can more easily find frequently used links, documents, etc.  That being said…

The USPTO Guide for the Preparation of Patent Drawings (Microsoft Word document, ~140 pages long, ~6MB in size) has a few pages showing preferred cross-hatching.  Here’s a local link to a PDF of just the three pages on cross hatching.

Matt over at PatentFizz has announced that PatentFizz is now starting to cover published patent applications. Very cool!

What can you do at PatentFizz? Oh, let me count the ways!
1. Download PDF copies of patents.
2. Download PDF copies of just the first pages of patents.
3. Enter a patent number and have all the relevant information for a patent on one page.
4. Check whether a patent is expired.
5. Leave comments (for instance, invalidating prior art) on a third party’s patents.
6. Automatically generate a weekly (delivered by email) report regarding patents issued in a class, to an assignee, etc.

Way to go Matt!

Today, I noticed this gem when I went to access Public PAIR:

If it means that PAIR and TDR are less likely to be offline (which I’ve seen a number of times in the past month)…GREAT.

If it means that practitioners will have yet another impediment to easy access to government data…NOT GOOD.

Neat way of patent searching…visually, by viewing the first pages of your search results:

www.patentscrounger.com