THE U.S. CONSTITUTION MANDATES A PUBLIC PATENT DATABASE

The SEC EDGAR database was doing great, but the Patent office was still dragging their heels on making their data available to the public. There were a few alternatives around, such as IBM's Patent server (now Delphion.Com), but it seemed that the Patent database, specifically mentioned in the United States Constitution as a tool for promoting the spread of knowledge, should be on-line.

We decided to take matters into our own hands. If the Patent office couldn't put it's data on-line, we certainly could. We spent several months building a system for serving patents and trademarks, but for good measure we wrote a letter to the Vice President (and bcc'd the New York Times). It seemed like a waste of time for us to run a system for a couple of years and then engage in a food fight with the U.S. Government to take it over. We made that point and suggested that if the U.S. government would simply announce in the next 60 days that they would release the patent database to the public, we would all be spared a lot of trouble.

On June 25, two days before our 60-day timer expired and our system was almost ready to go live, Commissioner Lehman gave a speech to the American Bar Association saying that the government would be releasing the full text of all patents on the Internet. Press releases were issued and comments were solicited. The data magically appeared. Unfortunately, the data was only made available on a search engine with limited capacity and no bulk archives for downloading, making it hard for others to build their own search engines. As a partial remedy, we went back in a couple of years later and post 17 years of bulk archives.

URL: http://public.resource.org/