Good patents support innovation while bad patents hinder it. Bad patents drive up costs for innovative companies that must choose between paying undeserved license fees or staggering litigation costs. That’s why today we are excited to launch a new version of
Google Patents, which has the power to improve patent quality by helping experts and the public find the most relevant references for judging whether a patent is valid.
The ability to search for the most relevant references--the best prior art--is more important today than ever. Patent filings have steadily
increased with 600,000 applications filed and 300,000 patents issued in 2014 alone. At the same time, litigation rates are continuing
their dramatic climb, with patent trolls bringing the majority of cases, hitting companies of every size in industries from high-tech to main street.
Traditional searches often focus on other patents. But the best prior art might be a harder-to-find book, article, or manual. That was true in the “shopping cart” patent case. After many companies paid out millions in settlements, a court finally
struck down the patent in light of two books that were not found by the examiner who issued the patent.
The new
Google Patents helps users find non-patent prior art by cataloguing it, using the same scheme that applies to patents. We’ve trained a machine classification model to classify everything found in
Google Scholar using
Cooperative Patent Classification codes. Now users can search for “
autonomous vehicles” or “
email encryption” and find prior art across patents, technical journals, scientific books,
and more.
We’ve also simplified the interface, giving users one location for all patent-related searching and intuitive search fields. And thanks to
Google Translate, users can search for foreign patent documents using English keywords. As we said in our May 2015
comments on the PTO’s Patent Quality Initiative, we hope this tool will make patent examination more efficient and help stop bad patents from issuing which would be good for innovation and benefit the public.
Posted by Allen Lo, Deputy General Counsel for Patents and Ian Wetherbee, Software Engineer for Google Patents
Could you add a checkbox to only show non-patent literature (NPL)? Or else import the CPC classification feature into Google Scholar. Some technologies are more readily searched in NPL rather than in patent documents, so it would be good to be able to filter by one or the other. Thanks for making our job easier!
ReplyDeleteI love Google Patents. Here are a few feature requests (in case you are soliciting):
ReplyDelete- Incorporate changes made in re-exams, certificates of correction, etc.
- Estimate the patent's expiration date based on the PTO's Patent Term Calculator spreadsheet. Link to any Terminal Disclaimers.
- Save a patent to Google Docs (enabling: sharing, highlighting, notes, etc.).