U.K. considers wiki to ease patent bottleneck
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Proposal would set up peer review of patents via wiki before they are submitted to government examiners.
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The Patents (Third) Amendment Bill, which might be tabled in Parliament during the coming winter session, is a Bill which will pave the way for a new patent law.
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Google is developing an online publishing platform where people can write entries on subjects they know, an idea thatâs close to Wikipediaâs user-contributed encyclopedia.
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DTI, Patent Office get started on Gowers A hand-picked group of 40 small businesses in the UK is to be offered "intellectual property health checks" by the Department of Trade and Industry, in line with recommendations laid out in the Gowers review on intellectual property.â¦
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InfoWorld - U.S. technology vendors submitted five patent applications for last Friday&#39;s launch of a Web site that allows the public to review proposals before patents are granted. Less than a week later, the public had submitted claims of previous inventions that could invalidate each one.
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This patent, as well as others, could yield information about company's plans for a "Gphone."
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UKPO considers Gowers recommendations The UK Patent Office is considering how it might implement some of the recommendations of the Gowers Review of intellectual property law in the UK. One of the suggestions Gowers made in the report was that the patent authorities should evaluate how peer review might improve the patent checking process.â¦
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High rate of patents, open-source age increase importance of intellectual property issues.
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There are no guarantees in business -- especially when it comes to getting to the top of the ladder. Wired's How To Wiki gives you career-advancement suggestions that don't involve subterfuge and blackmail. But we can't cover everything ... without your help, so please give us your suggestions, too. It's a wiki, you know.
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Do patents, white papers, and other publications authored by search engine employees provide clear guidance to how to optimize Web pages?  A panel of experts debated the issue at a recent Search Engine Strategies conference.
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(InfoWorld) - If you've ever dreamed up an ingenious new invention and then wondered if someone else has already made it, Google's new patent search offering is for you. The new site, www.google.com/patents, lets anyone search for U.S. patents by keyword, patent number, inventor, and filing date. Users can view a scanned image of the original patent and zoom in on pages. The main search page displays five different random patents each time the page is visited. Recent inventions that popped up include toy skunk, pocket protector, toupee, and doll having delayed wetting and crying action. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) already allows anyone to search its site for patent documents. But Google's offering may have some advantages. "The existing Web sites have patents that you can view so it's not that the information isn't there. The problem is finding it and that's where Google's expertise comes in," said Mike Overy, secretary for the Wessex Round Table of Inventors, an inventors club in England. Overy formerly developed products for Nokia and is now a freelance inventor. Google said that like its Web search technology, the patent search site uses a number of different signals to evaluate how relevant each patent is to a user's query and then determines results algorithmically. The USPTO is not the only patent office to offer an online patent search facility. The European Patent Office also hosts such a service, covering patents from European countries, the U.S., Canada and other patent authorities. Overy finds that database good but not very user friendly, he said. Discovering existing patents is extremely important for inventors, Overy said. While Google's new offering may ease what is often an incredibly tedious job, it may not be able to fully solve the problem, he said. One issue inherent in new inventions is naming them. "If you've invented what you think is the first gizmo whatsit and you type that into a search engine, you won't find much because the other person who invented it called it something different," he said. Google's patent search covers 7 million patents. The database doesn't include patents issued in the last few months but Google "looks forward to expanding our coverage in the future," according to the frequently asked questions section of its site. Although Google's database only lists U.S. patents for now, the company said it hopes to expand the patent offices it includes and languages it supports. Presumably the site will one day allow users to save and print patents too: a note at the bottom of a posting about the new service on the Google blog says that a reference to saving and printing has been removed since Google is still working on the capabilities.
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Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has set Jan. 7 as the launch date for an open-source search project that eventually hopes to challenge Google and other established players.The Wikia Search project has assembled the basic technologies for a search engine, including a search application, search algorithm and Web crawler. The project will allow technology enthusiasts to help filter sites and rank search results, using a community model akin to that of Wikipedia.The idea is to challenge the established players by offering a search service that is more transparent to end users, meaning they can see how search results are arrived at. Wales has described Yahoo and Google as opaque services that don&#39;t explain how results are arrived at.Wales has started to invite a handful of people to test an early version of the search platform, which will be publicly launched on Jan. 7, he wrote in an email to the Wikia mailing list Monday.The search tool will take time to evolve, and the initial service won&#39;t match the capabilities of the leading search engines. Contributors will have to develop the search platform over time, in a similar way that Wikipedia took time to get enough entries to be useful.The search project is part of Wales&#39; for-profit company, Wikia Inc., which offers a software platform that anyone can use to build wikis. In a similar way,&#160;the Wikia Project will allow other people to build their own search engines.Wikia Inc. was started in 2004 and has received investment money from Amazon.com and Bessemer Venture Partners.&#160;
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Dupe, dupe, de-dupe The US and UK patent offices have agreed to share and recognise each other's patent examination reports under a new deal. The offices hope the deal could save significant application time for would-be patent holders.â¦
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Conflicts with European law, they say A group of small British businesses has mounted a challenge to changes made by the Intellectual Property Office's (formerly known as the Patent Office) to the scope of the monopoly a patent holder can be granted for a software patent.â¦
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Microsoft is not the realÂ patent threatÂ Linux and open source developers should be worried about, said Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. In fact, the software giant will itself be fighting against the software patents system within a few years, Shuttleworth predicted.
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A plan to help overburdened patent examiners solicits online advice from outside sources (read: you), calling on Slashdot's founder for a system to rank user comments. Plus: China blocks LiveJournal. In 27B Stroke 6.
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Users, developers want more hints about Google's plans for the hosted wiki service it acquired.