Google Launches 'Prior Art Finder' For Patents
from the interesting-development dept
Google has announced a new offering called the Prior Art Finder, in which it tries to help anyone find prior art on patents. When you view a patent via Google's patent database, there will now be a button you can click, which tries to take terms from the patent, and displays a variety of related info from the date that the patent was filed:
The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.What I find most interesting about this is the fact that they're dating the results of the search to anything existing prior to the date of the filing. One of the big complaints that people make when others discuss how obvious or non-novel a patent is, is that it's impossible to go back to how the world was at the time the patent was filed. This effort seems to take one step in the direction of fixing that, though the quality of the results will matter quite a bit. I do wonder how useful this tool will be in the early days (especially concerning much older patents when there wasn't nearly as much info online), but I could see how it would become much more useful in the future, as Google both improves it and when it's searching a much larger database of knowledge and information.
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Assuming Google keeps it up
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Re: Assuming Google keeps it up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents
I bet they know it's in their own interest to make the poor system we have work as best as we can; and it fits in with their general ideology of organizing the worlds information. They may roll it into another service somewhere down the road, but I doubt we'll lose the functionality without some company-wide catastrophe.
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Crowdsourcing
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Re: Crowdsourcing
https://www.eff.org/patent-busting
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Has Google been added to their blacklist yet? If this affects their bottom line, it will be - and I'm sure they will have some bizarro rational for doing so.
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Re: Re: Crowdsourcing
A) Has EFF patented this?
B) If not, would a troll be daring to take on EFF?
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Re:
Of course - if they did search the internet then the number of patents granted would fall to zero.
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The score
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um, so ? ? ?
seems like it is just going to make the frustration of patent applicants more intense when their super-duper-googleized prior art esearch is ignored, just like always...
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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At last!
. . . to ensure that patent examiners, patent attorneys, and judges on patent cases are forbidden to use this site.
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Re: Crowdsourcing
http://www.groklaw.net/index.php
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Patent Owners Despair? Hardly
This is really an Infringement Finder if you know how to cut-and-paste.
http://gametimeip.com/2012/08/14/google-helps-patent-enforcement-companies-with-ne w-infringement-finder/
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They can use it in the future.
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Prior Art Argument
I mean I understand that something do seem and probably are trivial; but this almost seems like attempt to get anything someone comes up with dismissed (or worse, forced to give away ) based upon the assumption of some previous technique.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even prior art evolves if someone dedicates time and energy to find a better way of doing something. And giving away one's time and effort for the "betterment of society" is nice and all, but it doesn't put food on the table for very long. At worse, it turns on into a worker drone, always trying to stay ahead of some never-ending path.
I guess as I see it, patents serve to allow one to get a breather and possibly enjoy some of the reward of the work they put in. The evolution of technology is inevitable, but going at a break-neck pace is unhealthy.
Jim
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Re: um, so ? ? ?
So it's a bit like copyright's "fair use" -- it doesn't count for much until you're actually in court.
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Re: Prior Art Argument
If I develop a better car tire, the fact that car tires already exist does not invalidate the patent. If, however, my improvement already existed prior to my filing or I want to patent the concept of the car tire itself, the patent should not be valid.
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This might have actually mattered...
As it is it's a cool system, but seems to me to be pretty useless legally, at least with regards to the US.
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Good old pirate Mike is still sucking the big search cock
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Step 1: make obvious patent with prior art
Step 2: place DMCA takedown notices on old patents, to get them google search engine downgraded.
Step 3: Profit from lack of anyone being able to find prior art
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what do you know about patents?
That's because you cannot invalidate a patent with art dated after the date of filing. Once again, all you know about patents is you don't have any.
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It infringes on their right to sue for infringement.
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