The administration said the move is the latest in its efforts to make moregovernment information available to the public over the Web.
The Commerce Department's Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) by year's end will make available the full text of the 20 million patents dating back to 1976,and text and images of 800,000 trademarks and 300,000 pending registrationsfrom the late 1800s to the present. Trademark text will be available inAugust, with trademark images and patent text to follow in November, Daleysaid in an announcement.
The move to make the patent and trademark database freely available comesafter years of debate between the government and public interest advocateswho feel government information should be made available over the Internet.
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Today Malamud praised the announcement. "This is the right thing to do. TheClinton administration should get kudos for this."
Malamud, the head and founder of the Internet MulticastingService, also took on the Herculeantask ofposting online a profusion of raw data from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Then, as reported earlier, in a letter to Vice President Al Gore and Daley, Malamuddemanded that the Patent and Trademark Office comply with a 1996 paperreduction law andpublish online complete and up-to-date patent and trademark registryfiles--which in some cases can pile up to 500 pages.
A hero among public-disclosure advocates, Malamud in 1994 created andmaintained a small PTO database and a massive SEC site, now known as theEdgar Database, before that agency took it over 18 months later whenMalamud planned to shut it down.
The new PTO database was also praised by Vice President Al Gore, who, in astatement, hailed it as a "prime example of the success of theAdministration's policy of reinventing government to make it moreresponsive to the needs of its most important customer--the public."
In describing the new database in a speech prepared for delivery to theAmerican Bar Association in Williamsburg, Virginia, PTO commissioner BruceLehman said patent images that correlate to the electronic text will beavailable online by March of next year and users will be able toprint the images for free. Users will also be able to order online copiesfor electronic delivery.
Malamud said the purpose of having the patents and trademarks available onthe Internet is simple. "It promotes science. We get to see the processinvolved in developing" the patented product.
"Patents are the fence postsof what constitutes intellectual property. Science will progress morerapidly because we will be able to share more knowledge," he said.
In 1994, the PTO offered free Internet access to its AIDS patents database,offering the full text and document images for more than half of all AIDSresearch-related patents. This was followed in 1995 by a second wave ofdigital patent data with the posting, to PTO's Web site, of 20 years ofpatent bibliographic data and abstracts from more than 2 million patents.