Hope..With Someone Else's Image - Nope!!

It's been a busy week on the intellectual property front.

First, David Young, chief executive of Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, one of the country's largest book publishers pronounced that he would like to see legislation that would prevent the sale of books below cost. At issue is the price war between Wal-Mart and Amazon for some of the book titles expected to dominate the holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart is selling books below cost. Amazon is cutting costs and selling the digital versions for $9.99. The issue is economic. Independent booksellers and new writers will suffer when books are sold below cost. Wal-Mart appears to be paying the full price, the copyrights are being protected, and the authors are getting paid.

Then we have artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the famous Barack Obama "HOPE" poster, who, according to AP, admitted Friday that he didn't use the Associated Press photo he originally claimed his work was based on, a photo taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia, on assignment for the AP, at the National Press Club in Washington.

Mr. Fairey appears to have pulled in some serious money selling posters, autographed posters, and a whole range of stuff featuring his work. For more info on the emergence of the poster as a cultural icon see:

Ben Arnon: How the Obama "Hope" Poster Reached a Tipping Point and Became a Cultural Phenomenon: An Interview With the Artist Shepard Fairey

Mr. Fairey apparently had artistic amnesia when he said he didn't use the photo that featured a single image of then Senator Obama as claimed by AP intead saying used a picture with two images, one of Mr. Obama and another of actor George Clooney. By saying he used the picture with two people in it rather than the one with only Mr. Obama, he tried to claim he significantly modified the picture and was not infringing AP's copyright. He claimed that his work was covered under the fair use doctrine. But it now turns out he altered the single photo and added the word HOPE across the bottom.

His legal team lead by Mr. Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University -- withdrew from the case and said the artist had misled them by fabricating information and destroying other material. I can tell you this, when your lawyers quit on you because you didn't give them the straight story, it's not a good thing. When your lawyers are from the Fair Use Project and you misled them and destroyed material its a very bad thing.

Mr. Fairey earned much critical acclaim for his work, vandalism of public property aside (do you remember all those posters that showed up all over the place prior to the election?), Mr. Fairey earned quite a bit of money from his use of AP and Mr. Garcia's work.

In determining which of this week's intellectual property happenings is cause for concern, Mr Fairey wins. Mr. Fairey is the one who absconded with someone else's work without paying for it. The book publishers might be concerned that their product is being undervalued but at least it's being valued. In the case of AP and Mr. Garcia's work, they received no value. That's a greater concern.

Digital Ink and $6 Newspapers

The Sunday New York Times now has a $6.00 price tag. What is the tangible and cerebral value of the physical newspaper that you don't get with the free digital ink version. Why do you spend $6.00 for something you can get for free?

Today's $6.00 NYT was bought at the local Starbucks. Unlike the electronic version, you can hold it in your hand, spread it out in front of you. What you get is its layout, its physical presentation, the placement of the stories and the ads, and even how the sections are set up in the bundle. The two most timely sections - news and sports - are on top, on the outside of the bundle. The book review, travel section, and magazine are buried in the middle because they were finished first and waited for the rest of the paper to be built around it.

The NY Times starts with international news as you go through the news section and then moves to the US, then to the Regional News and then the New York news. This is the exact opposite of how the Washington Post's physical news section is laid out. You don't get this flow when you look at the digital edition even though all the pieces are there. Is the value of the paper this flow?

You spread all the sections out, browse across the sections deciding on your reading strategy, what to read first, what to save for last and then begin the ritual. Browsing is easier, there is a more intuitive sense of flow than the digital version and you can actually read more than one section at once without having to have a big screen monitor and two browser windows open.

You hold the paper in front of you as you watch the people coming and going. No one reads People at the Starbucks. Books and newspapers. Unless they are staring at their laptop. Are people in coffee shops more intellectual or do they just look that way? When you leave you fold up your paper and carry it out of the store prominently displayed. It makes a statement about being intellectually engaged (or maybe economically stupid.) You can't do that with a Kindle.

But here we are. To write this post you need the digital version. You need the hyperlinks, permalinks and digital browsing. The current state of affairs for books, newspapers, music, inventions, copyrights, patents, and all other forms of intellectual property and their existence in the physical and digital worlds is being driven by the New York Times question: Why do you pay $6.00 for something you can get for free?

Dick Tracy Watch Gets FCC Approval

Gizmo Alert!! According to CNET the FCC has approved LG's Dick Tracy watch. CNET watches the FCC database to stay on top of what's next. I wonder can you use a cartoon as prior art?

The LG GD910 certainly meets the Gizmo test.

• Tempered glass, and high-quality metal casing construction
• 1.43" diagonal face measurement, by about .5" thickness
• LG's flash interface featuring touch-screen input
• Voice recognition, and text to speech so it can "read out" text messages
• Bluetooth connectivity
• Three side-mounted buttons
• A speakerphone
• A full-blown MP3 music player
• Water resistant design
• 7.2 Mbps 3G HSDPA compatibility, enabling high-speed data transmission and video calls using the built-in camera

The TV is missing but since it supports video calls, it looks likeit has it all. Chester Gould and Al Gross were ahead of their time. Check out the Chester Gould Dick Tracy Museum.

Celebrity Watch - Information Edition

For those of you who, from time to time, engage in a little electronic celebrity stalking we bring your Celebrity Watch Information Edition. We suggest you try the FBI's Electronic Freedom of Information Acts (EFOIA) electronic reading room.

The FBI's electronic reading room is where the FBI posts frequently requested information sought under the Freedom of Information Act. For you celebrity stalkers, the reading room features the links to the files they have assembled on "Famous People". Its luminaries include Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Desi Arnez, John Lennon, and Gene Autry among others. Malcolm X is listed as "Little, Malcolm X." There are files on Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Dr. Martin Luther King, and John Steinbeck.

If you are looking for additional entertainment, check out the Unusual Phenomena listings for Project Blue Book, their investigation into UFOs, and, Animal Mutations. (Perhaps concern about discovering exactly when pigs would fly.)

For a while, the Elvis file was the most frequent FOIA subject in the entire Federal Government. The FBI saved a lot of money when it posted the file online rather then sending out hard copies to people FOIAing his record.

Electronic reading rooms and FOIA are the gateways to amazing amounts of scientific and technical information. Most federal agencies have electronic reading rooms on their website that include most frequently requested information and the actual EFOIA form. A well written FOIA request can be the gateway to tracking down high quality prior art and inventive activity information.

Roll Up Your Windows

From the Ridiculous Intellectual Property Enforcements Catalog we bring you "Roll Up Your Windows."

The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) filed a suit against AT&T asseting that RINGTONES QUALIFY AS A PUBLIC PERFORMANCE under the Copyright Act. What is ridiculous about this is that the mobile operators have already agreed to and are paying royalties on the ringtones that they sell to subscribers. Now they want the mobile operators to pay when the phone rings in pubic.

According to a press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), ASCAP argues that phone carriers must pay additional royalties of face legal liability for contributing to what they claim is cell phone user's copyright infringement. Fred von Lohmann, an EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney added, "Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under the reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copy right violation for you to play your car radio with the window down."

It would be a nice thing to silence the cell phones in restaurants (and elevators, and Starbucks, and at the hair place) but it's hardly the ringtones that are annoying. But for now we may need to roll up those windows while this ridiculous claim proceeds or risk delivering a public performance with our cell phone ring tones.

Photomosaic Images, and Excellent Prior Art

We have come to love the art of excellent prior art. Finding really good prior art is one of those serendipitous search moments. Just doing a prior art search makes you smarter but when you find an elegant, amazing piece of prior art it's great. The best prior art quests tend to be part of invalidity efforts with big money, big principles, or both at stake. The one we discuss here is a big principle example.

A refresher on what USPTO says about prior art:

Under 35 U.S.C. 102(b) states: "A person shall be entitled to a patent unless -- (b) the invention was patented or disclosed in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of application for patent in the United States."

Excellent prior art was found by the people at Public Patent (PubPat) Foundation at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; a not-for-profit legal services organization whose mission is to protect freedom in the patent system. PubPat.org says that they represent the public's interest against undeserved patents and unsound patent policy. We are nonpartisan about their mission but impressed by their finely honed prior art skills.

In September of 2008, Pubpat asked USPTO to re-examine a patent for photomosaic images (6,137,498) The patent was filed in October 27, 1997 based on a provisional application dated January 2, 1997. The patent was granted in October 24, 2000. The reexamination appears to have triggered when the inventor, Robert Silvers of Cambridge, Mass. was sending cease and desist letters and asserting his patent against individuals, small businesses, and against the GIMP open source software program. On June 11th, 2009, PubPat received a copy of the USPTO Office Action invalidating 41 of the 63 claims including all of the independent claims. While the fight isn't totally over, this was a major victory.

What was the primary piece of prior art cited in the USPTO Office Action? The cover of the "Being Double Digital, The Media Lab at 10" November 1995 issue of WIRED magazine. The cover featured a photomosaic portrait of Nicolas Negroponte. This piece of prior art was actually created by Mr. Silvers himself. A piece of art previously submitted to USPTO.

To add to the sublime nature of this particular piece of prior art is the fact that Mr. Silvers' bio cites the Media Lab under his educational credits. Mr. Silvers published a paper titled "Mosaics: Putting Pictures in their Place". The paper was submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning as part of the requirements for a Degree of Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) That paper, published in 1996. The document itself states "In 1994, he entered the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The very institution that the WIRED magazine profiled in the November 1995 issue that was used to invalidate Mr. Silver's patent. It's interesting that Mr. Silver's own work is not cited on the patent document.

Mr. Silver passes the patent number test. Mr. Silvers' web site includes his patent number on the bottom of every page. Perhaps Mr. Silver will need to modify his website now.

Where Are The Patent Numbers? - Windustry Edition

Today we add the latest installment in our Eschew IP Obfuscation campaign. We look at recent events in the emerging "Windustry" - the US wind market.

On May 11th, Susan Decker of Bloomberg.com reported that General Electric had asked the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to block Mitsubishi Heavy Industries from importing rival equipment into the United States claiming that it misappropriated three of GE's patents. "Turbines made by Mitsubishi, Japan's largest heavy machinery maker, infringe three patents..." Ok, three patents, which ones?


The article goes on and adds, "Today's wind turbines use different technology, than covered by the GE patents, Mitsubishi lawyer Roger Taylor told the judge. "GE is forced to twist and contort the meaning of its patents to prove infringement." GE says Mitsubishi is infringing, Mitsubishi says not so fast, this is a stretch. We also learn, the ITC acts as a third party arguing on behalf of the public, and has taken the position that there was no violation of GE's patent rights. When did that happen?

On June 10th, the Lexology business intelligence newsletter included a post from Joanna Boag-Thompson of Sherpherd & Wedderburn LLP citing, "GE is the proprietor of three patents which relate to variable speed turbines. Ms. Boag-Thompson notes that GE alleges that the turbines sold by Mitsubishi infringe GE's patents and therefore that Mitsubishi's import of turbines should be blocked. Further in the post she notes that, "An initial ruling is set to be issued by the ITC on 7 August. The initial ruling will be issued by one judge (Carl Charneski) and, once the initial ruling has been issued, the full US ITC then has until 7 December to complete its investigation and either modify, accept or reject the initial ruling. Any order to block imports could, however, ultimately be overturned by the US trade representative Ron Kirk for policy reasons."

The articles report that GE got into the wind turbine market in 2002 after buying the wind turbine assets out of bankruptcy from Enron Corporation. GE had about $6 Billion in global sales of wind turbines in 2008. Mitsubishi's web site says, "Since the 1980s, Misubishi has pioneered the development of high-efficiency wind turbines." Still no details on the patents, GE's so Mitsubishi's, we press on.

Greenstockscentral.com notes in their coverage notes that the three patents asserted by GE were issued in 1992, 2005, and 2008, and are related to variable speed turbines that adjust to insure there is a consistent power being supplied to the electrical grid without damaging the machines and to deal with periods where there is low voltage on the grid, such as a during a power outage. Greenstockscentral.com's info apparently came from National Wind Watch. They point back to Susan Becker at Bloomberg.com. Still no patent numbers. But at least we have some kind of clue to the age of the patents.

But, if GE only got into the wind turbine business in 2002, where did the 1992 patent come from? Enron? Was GE doing R&D work in that area but wasn't selling products. Why are these innovations important? Were their licensing discussions that broke down, are there other infringement matters that are underway? How did the ITC staff make it's decision so quickly? Or at least it looks like it was quick given the information available on the ITC investigation. So the information quest continues. Find the source documents, the complaint to the ITC.

The case is In the Matter of Certain Variable Speed Wind Turbines and Components Thereof, 337-641, U.S. International Trade Commission.

A 337 Investigation is a trade remedy investigation involving claims regarding intellectual property rights including allegations of patent infringement by imported goods. This is a particularly onerous process because a finding that imported goods are infringing a US patent stops the goods at the border. Immigration and Customs Enforcement get an order from the judge and stops the products from entering the US. This is a "we're not messing around" kind of move. If you are on the wrong side of one of these actions, it's a very big problem especially when your dealing with products as expensive as a wind turbine.

Next stop, the ITC website. After a circuitous hunt riddled with dead links and curiously misleading information perhaps designed for the Intellectual Property Cognescenti, we find that public documents are in something called EDIS. To get to the public documents requires creating a user ID.

(Information police: this user ID sign up form includes a list of states NOT in alphabetical order. Strangely disorienting. Does the ITC not know how to alphabetize? Then there's the security question, "What city was your mother/father born in?" Which one? Mother's city, Father's city, does the slash indicate they want both with a slash? Does the ITC assume everyone's parents were born in the same city? But I digress.)

After the get a user ID drill and logging into EDIS, we get to the search screen which takes us to the investigation screen, which then tells us the investigation is confidential and we can't see the documents. So the public document portal doesn't contain public documents after all. We move on but still don't know what EDIS stands for...Electronic Docket Information System? Who knows.

This is kind of perturbing, We can see how keeping the trade secrets of how GE implemented the inventions disclosed in its patents might be confidential but what about the the patent numbers? Come on. But we learn that the investigation number is now 337-TA-641.

This is just too hard.

How about checking the GE site next? Very nice web site, plenty of big brother stuff about how the smart grid will monitor our electricity so that we'll all be doing laundry at 2am but nothing on the web site about the wind turbine infringement. On its R&D GE page says, "GE became the first organization in history to be assigned its 50,000th patent. GE achieved this historic milestone in 1978, the year of the company's centennial. And, they have 36,000 technologists, impressive. Nice R&D blog, "From Edison's Desk" on what GE is up to including the Smart Grid work in Miami. GE gets the new media thing - YouTube Video created by GE put on YouTube and then linked into their blog.

Note to self, add GE.com to list of prior art search locations. Still no patent numbers.

More hunting. According to a news report four of the world's top wind turbine manufacturers are GE Energy, Gamesa, Siemens, and Vestas and they are worried about a tax credit that is about to expire. Vestas has some nice patents. Gamesa is a Spanish company, apparently a smaller player. Only GE manufacturer's wind turbines in the US according to a review of a George Mason University feasiblity study of the Pickens Plan to move to replace natural gas consumption in energy production with wind energy. No mention of Mitsubishi though. Still no patent numbers.

With more hunting we do learn from the Department of Energy that the US has the fastest growing market for wind. In 2007 we eclipsed Germany in Incremental Wind Capacity and are second only to Germany in Cummulative Wind Capacity. (Information police...does this make any sense. Germany's is smaller then the US in population, and land mass. What this says to me is we don't have much wind yet.) Turns out that Maryland, home of the Coronado Group, isn't represented in the "Windustry".

Then we find some interesting business data, courtesy of SC for Green blog scforgreen.com. "Wind turbine imports from Europe and Asia rose from $60 million in 2004 to $2.5 billion in 2008, according to Customs data reviewed by McClatchy Newspapers. Imports of other equipment usually, but not always, used for wind power production also increased in the same period. The value of AC generators and towers, for instance, jumped from $84 million to $1.6 billion." Exponential growth on the import front. Significant market expansion on the import front. Could be bad for business if you are GE. Still no patent numbers.

So, here's what we have so far:

• GE thinks Mitsubishi misappropriated the technology disclosed in three of its patents.
• Mitsubishi thinks GE is stretching their old technology patents to address current products. But if one of the patents was issued in 2008 how old could it be. Is this a blame it on USPTO moment?
  
• The ITC is investigating and has already made a decision sometime or other that they don't think GE's patent rights are being violated. We have no idea how they came to this decision or when.
  
• The three GE patents are of the 1992, 2005, and 2008 vintage.
• The US eclipsed Germany in the amount of incremental wind capacity but since Germany is considerably smaller and has less people, and we can assume less energy requirements, we don't really know what this means.
• Imports of wind turbines and their parts have grown exponentially over the last five years.
• Round one of the decision at ITC comes August 7th.
• Boone Pickens, Jeff Immelt, and others are anxious to build wind based energy generation capacity.
  

What we don't know -

• WHAT ARE THE PATENT NUMBERS?
  
• Why do these inventions matter?
• When do these patents expire?
• Are any of the other competitors using GE's technology, did they license it?
  
• Why is finding out this stuff so hard?
  

So, I give up for today. I'm going to see if I can find the patent numbers for this ITC action before the case gets decided in August. Stay tuned.

27,000 Patents and Counting

Today's interesting IP article -- "Bellevue's lab is an inventor's real dream"

The latest news of the inventions and intellectual property holdings of Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Washington from the Seattle Times Newspaper.

Netflix New Patent, & Intellectual Vertigo

On Tuesday we learned about the latest patent from Netflix courtesy of Aaron Feigelson's blog 12:01 Tuesday. 12:01 Tuesday is the time each week that the Patent and Trademark Office issues the electronic gazette that publishes all of the newly granted patents.

Mr. Feigelson post provided insight into the origin of Netflix -- it's founder Reed Hastings started Netflix after paying a $40 late fee to Blockbuster eleven years ago. It's only five years? That's what Mr. Feigleson thought too. He then provided an insightful analysis of the new patent Netflix -- "Approach for managing rental items across a plurality of distribution locations", patent number 7,546,252.

The comments we found most interesting were:

"What do we make of the Examiner’s statement in the Notice of Allowability:

“Applicant’s voluminous IDS received August 28, 2008 has been given a cursory review.”

"Should an accused infringer need to present clear & convincing evidence to show invalidity in this situation where the Examiner essentially admits he did not read the references?"

A cursory review?? They had this thing for six years even if the IDS only came in in 2008. Ah, but it's bad to jump to conclusions with our doing a little work of your own. So, we did.

Since we specialize in all manner of technology for searching and researching intellectual property matters, we decided to see for ourselves. It was a nice Friday afternoon so we decided to spend a little time on it.

We read the claims. Eighty seven total claims, 6 independent claims, 81 dependent leading to intellectual vertigo. So many permutations we couldn't keep them straight.

This lead us to ask our own interesting question: How hard would it be to find all these references if you had to start from scratch; would it have been so hard for the examiner to read the references. So we spent a few minutes seeing what we were up against.

We started with the 58 patent prior art references including my personal favorite 6,334,127,

System, method and article of manufacture for making serendipity-weighted recommendations to a user. How can you not like something dealing with serendipitous recommendations? This one has 67 claims and its own voluminous set of patent and non-patent prior art citations. A cacophony of art across a broad spectrum of subject matter.

The application portfolio from inventor John N. Gross was interesting. Since these were PGPubs we couldn't figure out if he was an independent inventor or worked with another firm. We didn't look that hard though.

First we downloaded the File Wrapper -- it's huge. Too much to deal with for a casual Friday exercise. We'll extract it and figure out what's in there next week. None of the non-patent prior art was there though.

Then we started tooling around and tried to get to some of the prior art references gathered from the internet. This should be somewhat fruitful we thought. Not so. The very first one produced the following dead end as did many others revealing variations on the Not Found message.

Then there was a link that led to a one page reference to a library circulation system that cites how books are selected by computer based on the reader's grade. The link worked this time. It produced a silly reference but one that, if it wasn't their, might prove troublesome if someone tried to claim that Netflix' approach was like the process of stocking a book mobile.

There are two references from publications that are almost impossible to find:

Anonymous, Untitled, Press Release, Business Wire, Apr. 27, 1999, 1 page. cited by other .
Anonymous, Untitled, Press Release, The Washington Post, Apr. 24, 1999, 1 page. cited by other.

We look forward to reading the entire issue of the April 24th Washington Post looking to find the Anonymous Untitled Press Release that has something to do with inventory management, renting movies, taking books out of the library with the aid of a computer. This ought to cost a bundle if anyone tried to challenge the patent unless they are prepared to wonder to Alexandria to read the file itself.

Imagine if this application was submitted under the new proposed rules on claims. The enhanced information disclosure would be encyclopedic. Or maybe it would have been a deterent. Hard to tell at this point.

After this exercise, I started to feel bad for the examiner. I wonder it the examiner was overtaken by the urge to heave the whole file out the window? I wonder if the examiner figured, let these guys duke it out in the marketplace. USPTO has had this thing for years and if I don't get it off my docket I'm never going to hear the end of it. Maybe the use of the word approach was enough for the examiner to say, maybe Bilski will take care of this eventually. Maybe it was a nice Friday and the examiner decided enough, I'm done for the day.

Either way, the whole exercise was intellectual property, intellectual vertigo.

Folding Mobile Phones

Lately we have been digging around in the mobile telephone space. There's a lot of action there. Between new IPhones and Blackberries, the new Palm Pre, and the latest features from Nokia including their app store Ova, there are lots of interesting developments to watch evolve.

Under the heading of deja vu all over again, we wanted to see how far back you had to go to find a folding phone. We saw the early Motorola folding phone back in the 1990s, owned folding phones for the car including the Razr, and a host of other cell phones with different versions of the "fold" so we were curious.

Consider the 1905 patent that described a vibrator for a sound-telegraph apparatus' "specially constructed for use in the army or in other service where the apparatus must be portable or occupy but small space." It features a collapsing design with a fold out flap for the microphone. An elegant piece of work considering it was over 100 years ago. The inventor was Arvid Andersson Lind of Stockholm, Sweden, yet another testiment to Swedish design.

Boo to Boolean Searching

Boolean Searches and I don't get along.  A Boolean search makes you think about how to construct your search NOT what you are looking for.

One of our Doctor friends who is a very smart guy with lots of polysyllabic words in his vocabulary tried to construct a Boolean search for me to prove he could do it.  The man is brilliant, he can operate using the da vinci surgery robotics system and teach medical school.  The Boolean thing...too hard.  I gave him my keyword guessing machine analogy.  He equated it to a slot machine.  Then I made a really tragic mistake; I tried to explain it.  Aside from being able to talk about George Boole, the father of Boolean logic and its "and" "ors" and "nots"the rest of the conversation was unfulfilling all the way around.

I like cognitive searching.  Or semantic searching, searching related to the structure of language and logic, if you want to be more accurate.  

Cognitive searching lets you search using your ideas.  You can create a stream of consciousness text entry that describes what you are looking for and then hit enter.  The search uses latent semantic analysis to understand what you are looking for and then go find it.  This is a much more satisfying search experience.

At Coronado Group we are very good at cognitive searching.

Painful Patents

On Monday, May 11th, Greg Aharonian of Internet Patent News Service reported the following:                                

"NO GERMAN PATENT FOR A SAUDI KILLER CHIP"

"Newswires report that the German Patent Office last Friday rejected a patent application from a Saudi inventor which tried to claim implanting semiconductors under the skins of visitors and remotely killing them if they misbehave.  The chip would allow GPS tracking to prevent immigrants from overstaying, with some chips containing cyanide to be released by remote control to "eliminate" people if they become a security risk."

Gruesome...

But during a recent search focused on wearable technology we found US Patent 3,885,576. Inventor Eliot Symmes's 1975 patent, "Wrist Band Including a Mercury Switch To Induce an Electric Shock" discloses, "a wrist band including a normally open mercury switch is worn by a person so that when the  person raises his arm to put a cigarette to is lips...the mercury switch closes to connect a source of power ad induce an electrical shock in the person in order to deter the person from smoking, drinking or the like."

Ouch... 

Keyword Guessing Machine

An invention can’t be described in the 10 words supported by the leading internet search engines. Is a series of words and a few “ands”, and “ors” enough to describe the state of the art in any technology?   How do you find the terms to describe innovations over a 20 or 30 year time horizon?  What words do you need to know to get good results?  For most intellectual property research activities, conventional search becomes a Keyword Guessing Machine. 

The Keyword Guessing Machine takes you down the tedious path from one search to the next, keyword to keyword, combining keywords with Boolean operators, ands, ors, and nots, to try to find the right art.  The quality of the results is contingent on the searcher’s understanding of the keywords and vocabulary associated with the art.  A series of   Boolean operators are needed to build searches that define complex ideas. 

Searches are complicated by the need to look across time and address a constantly evolving vocabulary used to describe inventive art.   Keyword and full text searching do not compensate for the evolution in the lexicon used to describe a field of research and often have limited mechanisms to understand all of the concepts embodied by a single term. Researchers need to execute multiple queries using the vocabulary of the era or weed out search results that contain the same words but don’t embody the right concept. 

Conventional search dilutes the power of the terms and its underlying concepts. Associations become overused losing important related concepts or the meaning of search words over time.  

Search paralysis sets in when combinations of words yield no new or usable results.  Users then start again with a new set of terms.  The more novel or complex the idea, the harder it is to get meaningful results or to follow a thread of subject matter the way an inventor, attorney, or patent professional thinks about and defines their art.

If you look at the May 6th posting for the original Cybercash electronic commerce patent, it's hard to imagine that meaningful prior art could be found using the search terms defined by the examiner or that a researcher would know the right combination of words to find the appropriate art.  Keyword searching when looking for prior art if difficult, time consuming, and very frustrating.
 

Search Can Get Ugly

Part of the Examiner's search request for Patent Number  6,092,053 now owned by Paypal, Inc.

The invention is described as:

A system and method for merchant invoked electronic commerce allowing consumers to purchase items over a network and merchants to receive payment information relating to the purchases. The system includes a server having software which gathers the purchasing information from a consumer to complete a purchasing transaction over a network. The system has a consumer data structure that stores purchasing information for registered consumers. The software is able to access the consumer data structure and enter the consumer's purchasing information during subsequent purchases. Having the software obtain and enter the consumer's purchasing information, the consumer does not have to enter the same information every time they purchase an item over the network. In alternate embodiments, the same technology can be applied to other arenas where a user may have to enter the same repetitive information.

A Fundamental Intellectual Property Challenge

Digital scientific literature is accelerating inventive activity and faster development of emerging technology.

There aren’t enough Subject Matter Experts to find prior art for new and emerging technology.

A new search paradigm is needed to support expansion of inventive activity.