November 01, 1995
PAT 95-31

PTO Annouces Plan to put Patent Data on the Internet

PTO ANNOUNCES PLAN TO PUT PATENT DATA ON THE INTERNET

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Commerce Department's Patent and Trademark Office today
announced it will make patent information available on the
internet via the PTO home page at no charge to the public.
Simultaneously, PTO will begin to engage the public in a dialogue
to gain input into how the agency can maximize the potential of
its dissemination programs.  PTO will then use this input to
prepare an overall dissemination plan.

The new service will be available November 9, 1995 and will
provide more than 20 years of searchable patent bibliographic
text data, approximately 8 gigabytes of information.

Information from the Patent and Trademark Office, one of the
nation's premier scientific organizations with several thousand
highly trained examiners and over 5 million patents, represents a
vast treasure of technological information.  This new service
reflects the continued efforts by the PTO to use information
technology as a tool for sharing and disseminating information
with its customers so that this vast treasure can be used to
facilitate increased innovation, economic growth, and
competitiveness.

Information is already disseminated though a variety of PTO
programs administered by the PTO's Office of Information
Dissemination.  PTO's efforts to use information technology to
share and disseminate information is reflected in the
establishment of videoconferencing capabilities at the Sunnyvale
Center for Innovation, Invention, and Ideas in Sunnyvale, CA
which allows our customers on the west coast to meet with PTO
examiners without travelling to Washington, D.C..  Internet
access to PTO information is consistent with existing PTO
practice which provides access to the same bibliographic data on
CD-ROMs, in the Public Search Room, in Patent and Trademark
Depository Libraries throughout the nation, and on the PTO
bulletin board service.
This new service is evidence of PTO's commitment to foster the
creation and growth of private sector commercial information
resellers.  As a result of this new service, individual inventors
and innovators in areas not readily accessible by the Patent and
Trademark Depository Library system will be able to do limited
initial searches to determine whether or not a more extensive
search is necessary at a PTDL or through a private source.

PTO believes that the new service will spur the creation and
growth of commercial online services to provide full text
searching on the internet.

"Since the inception of the American Patent system in 1790, our
mission has been to promote the progress of science and the
useful arts," PTO Commissioner Bruce Lehman said.  "This new
service will give our customers a new way to access important
government information which will help foster technological
innovation and increased economic growth."

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