Patent Search, News, and Valuation Features: OTI.com

[tweetmeme source=”Intellogist” only_single=false]  Patents equal big money these days; just look at the $4.5 billion Nortel patent portfolio sale this summer.  Here at Intellogist, we usually focus on patent  (and non-patent literature) search tools, but we also occasionally look at patent valuation tools.   The website OTI.com includes both patent search and valuation features, plus feeds of  relavent IP news and blog posts.  OTI, created by Ocean Tomo and The Intellectual Property Exchange International (IPXI), provides free patent searches of EPO data, IP-related news and blog feeds, and data on patent ratings, licensing transactions, and listed prices of patents currently for sale.  Read on to learn how to access the free search, news, and valuation features of OTI.com, and learn about a major problem which the site is currently facing!

Users must first register to create a free account before they have full access to all features on OTI.com. Both registered and non-registered users can access the patent search feature, which searches “patent data provided by The European Patent Office and updated through early 2009.”  The system claims that weekly updates of full text patent data is coming soon.  For now, the patent search features of OTI.com are very basic, and the information is outdated.  Registered users can additionally access the patent news, valuation, and licensing information that is also available on OTI.com, but much of this data appears to be outdated, too.

Users can search the site through a basic  form, where the user selects whether they are searching by free text, company, IPC code, or patent number. The user can also select whether to include non-US patents in the search results.  Suggestions for possible company names appear as you type if you are searching by company.   If you select to search by IPC code,  a table of the IPC classification hierarchy appears below the search form and allows you to select classes and subclasses within the IPC to search.

Search by keyword, company, IPC code, or patent number.

Search results are arranged under eight different tabs, with the number of relavent results listed on each section.  The eight tabs include:

• Patents – Patent data provided by the EPO and updated through early 2009 (as described above).  This is the only feature accessible to non-registered users.  Patent bibliographic data, abstract, family members, and IPC classification codes are included in the full record. Users can search for similar patents or other patents by the same inventor from the full record view.
• PatentRatings – Results link to the full patent data record (also accessible through the “Patents” tab), and a link is also provided to purchase the PatentRatings report for the patent.
• Patent-Bid/Ask™ – Listings and prices for relavent patent transactions on Patent-Bid/Ask.  Most listed results are from 2007-2008.

View a list of patent sales through Patent-Bid/Ask.

• Tynax– Listings for patents available on Tynax, “The Global Patent & Technology Trading Exchange.”
• IPXI – A graphic representation of the “Patent Value Index” for relevant industries and companies (which doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2009).

View a graph of the "Patent Value Index" for multiple large corporations.

• RoyaltySource – Summaries of licensing transactions.
• News – Relevant news articles.
• Blogs – Relevant blog posts.

Registered users can also personalize their homepage by adding various widgets, such as blog feeds, site statistics, newsfeeds, the latest listings on Patent/Bid-Ask, available technology on Tynax, or the display of a random patent.

Conclusion

OTI.com has one fatal flaw: many of the features don’t seem to have been updated since 2009.  Most search results (except for some news and blog post results) are from 2009 or prior, and the outdated patent data, especially, is a deal breaker for even using the site as a casual search tool.  The ability to track patent sales and licensing transactions of a single company or IPC class through OTI.com is an intriguing feature that may prove useful to patent analysts scoping out the patent holdings of a company or the latest events in a particular technology field.  However, these results would first have to be up-to-date if they were to prove useful at all.  Hopefully OTI.com will soon begin updating its data again, so IP professionals can begin to utilize the unique search, news, and valuation features offered by this site.

Do you know of any free or subscription tools for determining the value of a patent?  Let us know in the comments!

This post was contributed by Joelle Mornini. The Intellogist blog is provided for free by Intellogist’s parent company Landon IP, a major provider of patent searches, trademark searches, technical translations, and information retrieval services.