Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1999-11-15
2002-08-27
Coby, Frantz (Department: 2171)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C709S217000, C709S218000, C709S201000, C709S203000, C705S021000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06442549
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention generally relates to a method and system of information delivery, and more specifically relates to a method, product, and apparatus for processing reusable information.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
In exchange for disclosure of an invention, the issuance of a U.S. patent is a twenty year grant from the time filed by the government of a property right to the inventor to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention', with the patentee losing rights to the invention upon expiration. Title 37 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Section 1.362(d) provides that maintenance fees may be paid without surcharge for the six-month period beginning three, seven, and eleven years after the date of issue of patents based on applications filed on or after Dec. 12, 1980. An additional six-month grace period is provided by 35 U.S.C. 41(b) and 37 CFR 1.362(e) for payment of the maintenance fee with the surcharge set forth in 37 CFR 1.20(h), as amended effective Dec. 16, 1991. If the maintenance fee is not paid in the patent requiring such payment the patent will expire on the fourth, eighth, or twelfth anniversary of the grant. Eleven years since the first premature patent expiration in December 1985, over 275,000 patents have prematurely expired and entered the public domain with additional 1,000 patents prematurely expiring each week.
A common use of patent information and an early step in assessing the patentability of an invention is to perform prior art searches of existing patents. To assist patent examiners, the Automated Patent System (APS) was implemented in April of 1984 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) with over 400 million dollars of taxpayer money to provide sophisticated centralized on-line search capabilities. By accessing the APS database from a computer, an examiner can select patents for review based on the occurrence of specified words or phases, in particular combinations, in the document. The U.S. Congress has long recognized the importance of information dissemination to the PTO's mission. The PTO enabling legislation has several sections addressing information dissemination; the most relevant of these being the requirements that the PTO provide the public with direct access to its search systems. Consequently, the APS database has been available to the public in the PTO Public Search Room since 1990 and, initially on an experimental basis, in 14 of the 74 Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries since 1992.
U.S. patents offered by commercial data vendors is based on data furnished by the PTO. At present, the most prevalent mode of transferring data to the vendor community from the PTO is in the form of files on magnetic tape. For example, the PTO offers copies of the tapes that contain the text used as input in the building of the APS database. The premature expiration of a patent has never been a search requirement for the patent examiner. As a result, there has been no need for the PTO to incorporate this new reference information into the APS database. Currently, the APS database is the representation of the original library files of patent text data at the time of issuance and does not provide a data field for the premature expiration status of a patent. Though this is the primary source of data provided for sale by the PTO, commercial data vendors in turn have not recognized the potentially unrealized value of premature expiration information.
It is government's responsibility to publish what the public can not make, use, or sell. Aside from disclosure of the full patent document, the government also publishes the front-page information of the patent document in the Official Gazette. The following is from Chapter 2575 of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) Sixth Edition, Revision 1, September 1995.
A notice will appear in each issue of the Official Gazette which will indicate which patents have been granted 3, 7, and 11 years earlier, that the window period has opened, and that maintenance fee payments will now be accepted for those patents. Another Official Gazette notice published after expiration of the grace period will indicate any patent that has prematurely expired due to nonpayment of maintenance fees and any patents that have been reinstated. An annual compilation of such expirations and reinstatements will also be published.
This passage denotes the intention of government to publish what the public can make, use, or sell. All patents prior to December 1985 expire seventeen years after being granted. For example, if it is the first week of the year 1996 and the public wanted to read what patents had just expired, one would look at the Official Gazette from the first week of 1979. Essentially a book published seventeen years ago would be retrieved. For the first 195 years of the U.S. Patent System, there was no need to republish or compile expired patent information because it was previously published by default.
On Dec. 10, 1985, nearly 200 years since the first patent issued, the Official Gazette (OG) Notice had listed U.S. Pat. No. 4,291,808 to become the first patent ever to prematurely expire for failure to pay maintenance fees. Since then, the PTO has published weekly in the OG notices the patent numbers of the expiring patents. The release of the patent numbers only, limits the public to a manual, exhaustive, and inefficient cross-referenced retrieval of the newest patent documents that have prematurely expired, thereby creating for the first time a new need to compile this information. In 1987, the PTO released a series of CD-ROM subscription products including the Classification and Search Support Information System Bibliographic disc (CASSIS-BIB). This disc offers the search and retrieval of title-only patent information dating back to 1969. The subscriber can search for the status of a patent (withdrawn, reinstated, abandoned, or prematurely expired) and view the most current list of premature expired patents. Although the release of the CASSIS-BIB disc can help with the search of patent expirations and allows the subscriber the privacy and cost benefits of such a system, searching is limited to patent titles only, the disc is updated every two months and is not cost effective to update more frequently.
Because of significant changes in technology, revisions to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130, and the passage of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (Public Law 104-13), public access has further expanded through a variety of programs administered by the PTO's Office of Information Dissemination to include the access of patent and trademark information made available via the Internet and PTO Bulletin Board System (PTO-BBS). Upon browsing Internet sites, patent servers at the Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR), Community of Science, Chemical Abstracts Society (CAS), and IBM to name a few,. have all neglected to allow searching for the expiration status of a patent. The IBM Patent Server has come closest to this accomplishment where on Jun. 4, 1997, a maintenance. status field was integrated into the database which lists the status of a patent upon retrieval only, and is not yet a searchable field.
In November of 1994 the PTO established an on-line BBS. The PTO began to list exclusive files of premature expired patent numbers weekly and list master files of premature expired patent numbers every two months. The patent numbers are published in natural ascending order, and for more than ten years have been keyed in manually by the PTO. As a result, it is not uncommon to see occasional errors like the reversal of digits within the patent number based on an operator's manual entry. In 1995, the PTO added the release of the OG Notices on-line. In the OG Notice on Feb. 6, 1996, the PTO published the premature expired patent numbers for the week of Feb. 13, 1996 instead of the current week. On Mar. 12, 1996 the OG corrected the omission while the PTO-BBS did not. Since then, the exclusive files have been r
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