One bad apple…all practitioners suffer (The USPTO and Easy Access to Public Data)

January 31, 2008 on 11:03 am | In Patent Searching, USPTO |

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...]

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4 Comments

  1. Your presumption is correct, as far as I know. PAIR was pretty much inaccessible for most of December - just a lot of timeouts and page errors (at least for me and others in my office). One of the secretaries in my office called the PTO and was told that they were having a problem with “data mining” that was overloading the site. Things definitely seem to have improved since they put in the CAPTCHA.

    Comment by Jim — January 31, 2008 #

  2. The USPTO did post a public explanation, but you probably missed it because they didn’t post it until January 11, about a week and a half after the CAPTCHA was implemented.

    http://www.uspto.gov/main/homepagenews/2008jan11.htm

    “The reCAPTCHA deployment was an immediate response to a system outage problem caused by bots. The USPTO continues to explore long-term solutions to address the need for open access to the data by the Intellectual Property community.”

    Comment by Larry Kasoff — January 31, 2008 #

  3. Larry: Thanks for the link.

    Comment by Stephen M. Nipper — January 31, 2008 #

  4. Based on my experience, the CATPCHA made public PAIR more accessable because it was very difficult to access prior to the change.

    That said, I hope CATPCHA is only a temporary solution because data mining could be very beneficial in the long term.

    Comment by D.C. Patent Associate — February 1, 2008 #

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