Starting October 1, the PTO plans to start charging Patent Depositories around the country to access the PTO's APS patent text database system. As the proposed fees are excessive, it is unlikely many Patent Depositories will sign up for the service, including many of the 14 now getting access to APS for free. While it is quite reasonable for the PTO to cover its costs in providing access to its patent text (and image) database, their proposed plan makes limited use of existing technologies to provide information access to taxpayers. As such, the PTO should be lobbied to change its plans, Congress lobbied to give the PTO some of the NII money, or a greater impetus should be placed on a grass roots efforts to make data available over the Internet. Some background. The Automated Patent System, APS, is the PTO's large database of information on existing US patents, in particular, the full text and images of patents back to 1970 or so, plus other informations. The database is large, with full text of US patents taking up over 80 gigabytes of space, and the images over 500 gigabytes. It is the largest structured collection of science and technology information in the world. Currently there are four ways to access this database (short of buying the raw data yourself). The first is if you are a patent examiner, for which there are many APS terminals available in their office areas. The second way is to pay any one of the online database vendors such as Dialog fees ranging anywhere from $30/hour to $150/hour to access the data that these companies have bought from the PTO. The third way is that in the Public Search room at the PTO's Crystal City facilities in Washington there are APS terminals that you can pay $40 an hour to use. The fourth way is that at 14 of the Patent Depositories around the country, there is one APS terminal connected by leased lines to the PTO which patrons can use for free (originally as part of an experiment to measure citizen interest). It is this last access method that I use to download new patent titles data that I broadcast out as part of my Internet Patent News Service. If the PTO proceeds to charge the following fees and the Boston Public Library (the depository I use) does not have the funds to pay the fees, there is a good chance sometime in October that I will have to halt the new titles aspects of my Patent News Service. Why might this all happen? According to the August 30, 1994 Official Gazette, where the PTO announced its intentions, the PTO will be offering a tiered pricing scheme for the Depository Libraries to access the APS system. (The following discussions pertain just to the text part of the database, as the fees are even higher for text and images, but with similar assumptions). The scheme is as follows: Tiers Annual Usuage Annual Fee ----- ----------------- ------------ 1 0 - 300 hours $ 2,250 2 301 - 600 hours $ 6,750 3 601 - 900 hours $11,250 4 901 - 1200 hours $15,750 5 1201 - 1500 hours $20,250 For many of the smaller libraries acting as Patent Depository Libraries, such fees are budget busters, and many probably won't sign up. While many patrons (such as myself) would be glad to pay a fee to help the libraries recoup the cost, I doubt highly many of the libraries want to deal with the problems of collecting money and managing accounts. They are libraries, not businesses. Why are these fees so high? The PTO uses a figure of $15 an hour as the amortization of its annual cost in providing public access to the APS, and multiplying the midpoint of the yearly usage by this fee (for example, tier 1 with an average of 150 hours use times $15 becomes $2,250). Where does this $15 an hour figure come from? In the August 30 OG, the following budget is presented: COST ELEMENT PUBLIC SHARE ------------ ------------ Client Support Overtime $ 10,203 Additional Mainframe Costs $ 43,216 Software (license fee) $ 273,000 Training costs $ 10,000 subtotal $ 336,419 General & Admin. overhead @ 12% $ 40,976 Total Cost $ 377,395 Estimated Annual Usage (hours) 54,600 Unit Cost (per hour) $ 6.91 Telecommunications Costs (per hour) $ 8.00 Total Cost (per hour - rounded) $ 15 This budget is faulty for a variety reasons, and it makes one believe that the PTO wants to upset enough people who will complain to their Congressperson to give the PTO the money it needs to offer APS access in a way that best serves the taxpayers. Either that or the PTO is charging more than needed knowing that Congress will take its usual X percent off the top to pay for other agencies' programs (PTO fees do not go directly to the PTO). For example, in this day of online search tools like WAIS and at least a dozen other I know of available over the Internet for free, all more powerful by at least one order of magnitude than the APS search system (and at least one system two orders of magnitude better I could probably get donated to the PTO for free), why the hell is the PTO paying the American Chemical Society $273,000 a year to license the searching system currently used on APS, and one that the taxpayers will now have to pay for for their own use whether they like it or not? The ACS searching system is archaic (in its non-weighted BOOLEAN-term search style, and inability to keyword search subsets of the database like just the claims text) and the user interface at the user terminals command-line oriented in this era of GUIs. Also the data inside APS has to be organized better (for example, try finding all of the patents issued to Dow Chemical by examining by assignee - it is hard to march up what is indicated by CASSIS/BIB) to make searches less time consuming. Alternatively, the PTO could spend $80,000 to buy a fast RISC machine and have someone develop a backend to WAIS or some other free search system that could interface to the PTO's current APS text datafiles as stored on their networks. Thus $190,000 a year are saved on the annual costs, halfing the $377,000 annual cost to $190,000, reducing the unit cost per hour to $3.50 or the total cost per hour charged to the Depositories to $11.50 per hour (as opposed to $15), mitigating somewhat the high tiered fees. However, even more savings are possible. Part of the budget includes $8 an hour or leased line telecommunications costs between the Depositories and the PTO facilities in Crystal City. However for $1 an hour in most cities, you can get good Internet connection for stuff like email and text transfer. Even figuring another $1 at the Crystal City end, and $2 an hour for non-Internet cities, it seems that the hourly telecommunication cost can also be cut in half to $4 an hour, bring the total cost per hour charged to the Depository libraries down to $7.50 from $15, and with the help of many in the Internet world, I bet we could bring this figure down to $5 an hour. (This Internet approach is also preferable because the current leased lines in some cities drop much data over the phone lines when you are doing big text dumps. If the PTO is going to start charging, it will have to ensure the reliability of the leased lines being used). There are a large number of alternative methods for offering the public access to the APS system at a much lower cost than the $15 an hour the PTO will be effectively charging. Further for all of the money Congress is throwing at the Information Superhighway/NII/ARPADualUse/whatever, couldn't someone divert say, $500,000 (chump change) to put the APS onto the Internet once and for all for free? It would be one of the most effective technology transfer projects the government could ever do, providing the science, technology and inventing communities in this country with access to over 80 gigabytes of knowledge. Not only as a boost to inventing in this country, put access to such data would be a fertile testing grounds for people developing text retreival, technology assessment, automated reasoning, legal reasoning, and other automated tools. For example, with the $273,000 the PTO will spend to license from ACS, the PTO could alternatively spend $75,000 to buy 150 gigabytes of disk space for the PTO data, $30,000 for a T1 communications link to the Internet and have about $180,000 to buy a half dozen superfast RISC file servers (which would be as collectively powerful as the PTO's already overworked Amdahl mainframe system) that could handle the Mosaic/Lynx/WAIS/gopher searching load of the entire Internet (as well as allow companies and universities to download those subsets of the APS database of main interest to them to their local area networks to decrease the load on the public searching file servers). The PTO could donate the equipment to one of the universities willing to act as a host for the system in return for supplying faculty and student help to maintain and update the files. In any event, the proposed plan as it is presented in the OG is unfair to the taxpayers, given the technologies available, and given great interest in the Internet world of doing something collectively to make Internet access to APS convenient and inexpensive, if not free. What to do? The PTO contact for this effort is Robert Kopson, who can be reached by phone at 703-305-8510 or by fax at 703-305-8525, or by mail marked to his attention and addressed to the Commissioner of Patent and Trademarks, Washington, DC, 20231. Additionally contact your Congressional representatives and have them encourage the Senate and House subcommittees that oversee the Patent and Trademark Office to give the PTO $500,000 out of some technology budget to make the APS system freely available over the Internet. Also, if we could find 400 companies willing to contribute $1000 each (including the top 100 patent law firms) plus 2000 individuals to contribute $50 each, that would be another way to raise $500,000. Maybe someone could approach a company such as TI or IBM, who reap in hundreds of millions of dollars a year due to their successful patenting and licensing programs. Or maybe the Software Publishers Association would be willing to put up the same $300,000 it gave to the Software Patent Institute to play with, so that all of the US patent data (including all of the issued Computing patents of great interest to SPA members) can be placed on the Internet for open public access. All I know is that for the modest sums of money needed, the APS database should be placed on the Internet. But to charge the equivalent of $15 an hour in this day and age is a sad reflection of the very technologies that the PTO issues patents on. If nothing else, we will all have to work together and do it ourselves. Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service (for subscription info, send 'help' to patents@world.std.com) (for prior art search services info, send 'prior' to patents@world.std.com)