Google throws support behind Prior Art Archive
Google has shown its support for the newly-launched Prior Art Archive by connecting it with its Google Patents database.
Launched yesterday, October 3, the Prior Art Archive was designed to address the problem of low-quality patents which, according to the initiative’s creators, should not have been granted in the first place.
The Prior Art Archive, which was created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and technology company Cisco, will help USPTO examiners identify prior art and obvious technology.
In a blog post yesterday, Ian Wetherbee, manager of Google Patents, and Mike Lee, Google’s head of patents, said that applications should have to submit detailed disclosures when describing their inventions.
Meanwhile, patent examiners should conduct thorough searches of existing technology and reject any attempts to patent it, they added.
“A healthy patent system requires that patent applications and examiners be able to find and access the best documentation of state-of-the-art technology,” said Wetherbee and Lee.
“This documentation is often found in sources other than patents. Non-patent literature can be particularly hard to find and access in the software field, where it may take the form of user manuals, technical specifications, or product marketing materials,” they added.
Wetherbee and Lee explained that without access to this information, patent offices may grant patents that cover existing technology. As a result, the reliability of patent rights may be brought into question.
The Prior Art Archive addresses this problem by allowing anyone to upload technical materials and by making the information easy to find.
The archive can be found through Google Patents, and all of the documents have been labelled with Cooperative Patent Classification codes using Google’s machine-learning models.
The search engine introduced these labels into Google Patents to make the most relevant technical materials easier to find.
In addition, Google has recently launched a public site— TD Commons—where companies are able to publish, free of charge, technical information they don’t want to patent.
Using artificial intelligence, Google has also created the Google Patents Public Datasets to make large datasets available for public policy, economic and machine-learning research.
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