A Patent Application as Performance Art?

[tweetmeme source=”Intellogist” only_single=false] According to the the USPTO, the purpose of the US patent system is to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries” (from Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution).  Yes, we may occasionally find humorous patents that have the secondary effect of entertaining us, but even the most bizarre patent application is usually submitted in order to protect the inventors’ or applicants’ rights to a perceived discovery.  But once in a blue moon, you come across a patent application that must have been filed for another reason: it can only be a joke.  Or a brilliant piece of performance art.

The Anticipate This!™ Patent and Trademark Law Blog recently posted about “U.S. Pat. Appl. Pub. No. 20060259306:  Business method protecting jokes.”  The Blogging Biodiversity blog concluded that this ridiculous patent application (which also has equivalent patent applications in the UK and Australia, as well as a PCT application) must be a joke:

The whole thing is obviously a joke itself, intended to point out some of the absurdities of the patent system. For those with any background in patent law, reading the stiff language of patent applications applied to such a silly subject is additionally amusing.

I’m going to take this a step further: I believe that this patent application is an incredibly innovative piece of performance art.  After the jump, I’ll take a look at some file history documents for this patent application in PAIR and PATENTSCOPE, and I’ll explain why this application truly is a work of art.

Free Patent File History Tools: Ipsum vs. USPTO PAIR

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The USPTO public PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval) portal is an extremely useful tool for checking application statuses for US patent documents and viewing File Wrappers, which contain electronic versions of all correspondence  with the USPTO related to a particular  patent application.  The Intellogist Blog has posted a two part guide on how to use the public PAIR portal, and we’ve located the File Wrapper for the famous “Godly Powers” patent application on PAIR.

Earlier this month, the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO)  released the full version of its equivalent to PAIR: Ipsum.  Ipsum, available on the IPO website, describes itself as a “free online service which lets you check the status and access information on UK patent applications. You can also get copies of some documents from the open part of the file.”  A flurry of  online posts and articles praise Ipsum for potentially saving UK business as much as “£100,000 per year,” since it “will remove the cost to businesses of requesting patent documents; instead they will now be available for free at the click of a button.”

Does Ipsum have any unique features that differ from public PAIR?  How does the coverage of Ipsum compare to public PAIR?  And these free systems don’t offer a wide range of coverage, so where can you find patent file histories that aren’t available on Ipsum or PAIR? Find out after the jump!

Patent Workbench™: A New File History Tool

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Patent Workbench™ is a tool that I’ve come to know over the last few months. As I’ve used it, I’ve begun to get more and more excited about its capabilities, as it’s very different from other tools I’ve seen. Patent Workbench™ is a service that includes the Patent Workbench™ Reader. This service allows users to analyze and manipulate patent file history information – all of the paperwork, correspondence, and references included in the prosecution of a patent application with the patent office – using a special file history package prepared by Landon IP. Having the benefit of seeing the tool early (full disclosure: Patent Workbench was created by the parent company of Intellogist®, Landon IP), I’ve noticed some features that I think the Intellogist Blog Audience will be interested in learning about.

The goal of this blog post isn’t to sell you anything (trying Patent Workbench™ is free), but to view Patent Workbench™ from the eye of someone familiar with handling and manipulating patent file histories. Always wish you could take collaborative notes on a file history? Compare versions of claims throughout the prosecution history? Easily search through the entire file history at once?

Read on to find out how Patent Workbench™ can accomplish those tasks quickly and easily!

Do you know how to search Taiwanese patents?

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The EPO offers an excellent resource, the East meets West forum, which is directed to an “information exchange on Asian patents.”  I follow all the East meets West news in my RSS reader, and recently learned that the Taiwan Patent Office just launched a new English-language search interface.  What’s more, the database now offers new English-language citation information for documents back to January 1st, 2008.

The news release notes that citation information was previously only available in Chinese from the Taiwan patent search site.  This brings up an interesting fact about searching the patent office websites of other countries:  there are many features of Asian patent office search systems that are only available from their native-language interfaces.  To the uninitiated, this seems amazing, but document retrieval insiders who know the tricks of the trade will assure you that it’s true.  For example, I once labored for twenty minutes without success to download a TW patent from the older Taiwan search system interface, only to read the EPO tutorial and grab it from the Chinese interface in a few moments.  Lucky for us, the European Patent Office has tried to make this specialized knowledge available to the rest of us through their Virtual Helpdesk, which includes tutorials on patent searching in China, Taiwan, India, Japan, and Korea.