PTO teams with Google on database
Move is part of the agency's efforts to comply with President Obama's open government initiative.
The Patent and Trademark Office announced Wednesday 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 lacks the technical capacity to offer such a service, PTO said the two-year agreement with Google is a temporary solution while the agency seeks a contractor to build a database that would allow the public to access such information in electronic machine-readable bulk form.
PTO Director David Kappos said in a statement that the move is part of the agency's 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 the Google-operated site 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 provided such data only in bulk form for a fee.