from the New York Times


      June 25, 1998

U.S. to Release Patent Data on Web Site

      By JOHN MARKOFF

     In a new plan for making Government information freely available
     over the Internet, the Clinton Administration will announce
     Thursday that it will make the full data base of the nation's
     patents since 1976 and trademark text and images starting from the
     late 1800's available on the World Wide Web beginning in August.

     The project, which will create the largest Government data base on
     the Internet, is to be announced by Bruce A. Lehman, Assistant
     Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks,
     in a speech to the American Bar Association's section on
     intellectual property law in Williamsburg, Va.

     The decision to make the data base freely available is a result of
     a fierce debate that has gone on for years between public interest
     advocates who argue that Government information should routinely be
     made available on the Internet and companies that purchase the data
     from Government agencies to resell.

     Indeed, the Clinton Administration's action came less than a week
     before a deadline imposed by Carl Malamud, an independent Internet
     pioneer, who in May said he planned to purchase the data from the
     Patent and Trademark Office and make it publicly available if the
     Government failed to act.

     After imposing the deadline in a letter to Vice President Al Gore
     Jr. and the Commerce Secretary, William M. Daley, Malamud said that
     he had received an anonymous donation to support his project and
     that he was developing his own system of patent and trademark
     records.

     Lehman, however, said that his agency had already made a commitment
     to Gore to make the data base available as part of the Vice
     President's "reinventing government" program.

     Malamud said today that he had decided to shelve his plans.

     "Our site was a backup in case the Administration refused to
     budge," he said.

     "We very pleased with the outcome of this five-year struggle. The
     American public gets the data they deserve, and the Clinton
     Administration has shown real responsiveness by reversing its
     earlier policy."

     In January 1994, Malamud's group, the nonprofit Internet
     Multicasting Service, posted the full text of filings made by
     corporations to the Securities and Exchange Commission and several
     years of the patent data base over the objections of the S.E.C. and
     the Patent and Trademark Office. His organization later added data
     bases from the General Services Administration, the Federal
     Election Commission, the Federal Reserve Board and the Government
     Printing Office.

     In a telephone interview, Lehman said that it had long been his
     intention to make both data bases available on the Internet but
     that he needed first to meet a range of technical and policy
     criteria.

     "Creating a 1.3-terabyte searchable data base is a big technical
     feat," he said. A terabyte is one trillion characters of
     information, equivalent to about a million copies of "Moby Dick."

     First, he said, such a system requires tight security provisions to
     isolate it from the Patent and Trademark Office's internal computer
     network. In addition, he said, his agency had to perform an
     economic analysis on how the decision would affect both the Patent
     and Trademark Office and the information industry.

     "We have no interest in competing with the private sector," he
     said, adding that his agency's analysis had shown that the
     private-sector offers added value beyond the patent and trademark
     documents.

     The new data bases will be available at the Patent and Trademark
     Office's Web site beginning in August, when trademark text will go
     on line. Trademark images and patent text will follow in November.
     Patent images linked to the text of the patents will be made
     available by March 1999, he said.

     The data base of more than two million patents will be searchable
     by key word, as will more than 800,000 registered trademarks and
     300,000 pending trademarks. The entire data base will be made up of
     21 million documents.

     Currently the Patent and Trademark Office makes abstracts of
     patents available, a system that is already providing users with
     more than three million pages of patent material a month.

     The Patent and Trademark Office received 237,045 patent
     applications in the most recent fiscal year -- a 14.9 percent
     annual increase -- and approved about 114,000 patents. Trademark
     applications grew by 11.8 percent, to 224,355.

     The new data base on the World Wide Web is a significant step
     forward, Lehman said, adding that his plan calls for completely
     automating the nation's patent system by 2003.

                 Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company