31st January

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

by nipper. | Posted in IP Law Practice, USPTO   4 Comments »

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...]

Related posts:

  1. Public PAIR/Recaptcha’s unintended consequences?
  2. USPTO wants feedback regarding CWUs (chemical structure drawings, mathematical formulae, protein crystal data, and table data)
  3. Internet Access to Patent Application Files Now Available
  4. USPTO Notice re: application data sheets and changes to inventor information
  5. Apple gets IP

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 11:03 am and is filed under IP Law Practice, USPTO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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

  1. Jim Says:
    January 31st, 2008 at 12:11 pm

    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.

  2. Larry Kasoff Says:
    January 31st, 2008 at 3:17 pm

    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.”

  3. Stephen M. Nipper Says:
    January 31st, 2008 at 3:49 pm

    Larry: Thanks for the link.

  4. D.C. Patent Associate Says:
    February 1st, 2008 at 7:17 am

    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.