PTO Teams With Google On Trademark, Patent Database
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Wednesday announced it has reached a two-year "no-cost" agreement with Google to make patent and trademark data electronically available for free to the public in bulk form.
Saying it currently lacks the technical capacity to offer such a service itself, the PTO said the two-year agreement with Google is a temporary solution while the agency seeks a contractor to build the PTO its own database that would allow the public to access such data in electronic machine-readable bulk form.
PTO Director David Kappos said in a statement that the move is part of its efforts to comply with President Obama's Open Government initiative by "making valuable public patent and trademark information more widely available in a bulk form so companies and researchers can download it for analysis and research."
Some of the information that will be available on this new online site operated by Google includes: patent grants and published applications; trademark applications; trademark trial and appeal board proceedings; patent classification information; patent maintenance fee information; and patent and trademark assignments. Up until now, the PTO only provided such data in bulk form for a fee.
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