Striking deficiencies in the way patent offices around the world are digitising their information means that patents could be wrongly granted on thousands of inventions, says Willem Geert Lagemaat, president of PatCom, the European association of patent information providers.
In the latest edition of the journal World Patent Information (vol 27, p 27) he warns that even though most online patent archives are incomplete, parts of the paper-based collections that preceded them are being destroyed. Unless the authorities plug these gaps, the patenting process will descend into farce. . . . .
Of the 45 million patent documents that have been digitised worldwide so far, only 15 million have a full text version, and not one patent office has a searchable full-text version of all its publications.
Greg Aharonian, a patent expert based in San Francisco, also believes the patent system is failing. “There are problems with the patent databases, and given the ongoing problems with lack of searches for non-patent prior art, this will contribute to a further drop in quality of granted patents,” he says.
Read the article here.
Try a search at the United States Patent & Trademark Ofiice here.
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