It's patently obvious (maybe!)

It's patently obvious (maybe!) ...

Keywords Internet, Patents, Software

It is not really my function in this column to recommend commercial software. However, I shall make an exception to this rule on the pretext that you can use this program free of charge, provided that you consider that some publicity is acceptable. Many users of the Internet are confronted with the need to download files from various sites. These may be patches or upgrades for improving the performance of software or they may simply be data files in some form or another. Some of these files may be tens of megabytes long and some of them may be available from different sources, with different download times. Often, it may be required to download simultaneously a number of different data files of varying length.

There is nothing more frustrating than to download a long file ­ perhaps taking an hour or more­ for the connection to fail in the last few minutes. Alternatively, if you are downloading a number of data files, it is usually possible to run two or three simultaneously with a slight time advantage over running them consecutively, but doing this may occasionally crash your system and it is rarely possible to gain anything from more than three at any one time.

The software which I am advocating is a system which overcomes many of these problems. It is called Go!Zilla, claims to be compatible with all the usual browsers, and can be downloaded, free of charge, and without restrictions, from http://gizmo.net/

What can this software do?To start with, it can automate your download process. It does this with a variety of features which include searching the Internet for a choice of sites with the file name concerned, giving an appreciation of the quality of each connection. If one of the searched connections is not relevant, it is possible to discount it. During the download, it is possible to switch between the sources either automatically or manually if the connection qualities change. There is a constant graph showing the download process, so that you can easily see when the connection becomes poor. Should your connection be broken, for any reason, it is possible to resume the download where it left off, in many cases. If you are downloading a number of files simultaneously, the program automatically optimises what it is doing so that the available bandwidth is used to the best advantage. While a file is downloading, you can continue to use your PC normally, provided that you do not try to use the Internet for other purposes(you can do so, safely, but the rhythm of the download tends to be upset). I have used this software for downloading some really big files and I must say that I am quite impressed: subjectively, the downloads appear faster and they probably are, and resuming a download that had ground to a slow death really did work. I have also used it for simultaneously downloading some ten PDF files from a single site without difficulty.

By the way, if you do not like the publicity which flashes on your screen during downloading, you can eliminate it by purchasing the same software for a very nominal sum.

Let us now have a look at intellectual property, or, more specifically, patents. Obviously, if one has invented something, the first thought is whether it can be protected by a patent. To ask a patent attorney to have an official search made is essential but very costly. Before doing so, it would be wise to conduct your own search. If you find essentially the same thing has already been patented, then you can save a lot of money. If you find something similar but where your device has significantly different and apparently novel aspects, you can present the results of your "pre-search" to your attorney who can judge whether it is likely that an application would not be granted because of the prior art you found. This would also save you a bucketful of cash.

Nearly every country has an official repository for intellectual property. In the UK, for example, it is the Patent Office. Other than the offices of each country, there is also the European Patent Office, covering many countries both within and without the European Union. Most of these offices exchange databases, so that a patent in one country could be classed as prior art in any other country. A number of countries offer an official Web site for their patent offices but these sites do not necessarily contain a database search facility. I am therefore going to comment on a few national Web sites and a few database search engines which can be used to find out whether your brilliant idea has been previously protected. However, I emphasise that a layman can rarely judge what an examiner would consider as prior art, unless it is patently obvious (pun intended).

Starting with the "home"patent office of this journal, it may be found at http://www.patent.gov.uk

This is a neat site,correctly balanced to suit most users. It provides a wealth of information about all sorts of intellectual property, with a vertical hierarchy, often with intermediate pages with long menus. The forward navigation through these is easy, but backwards navigation seems to be only by using the Back button on the browser, rather than via the menu system. If you expect to do a search from this site, think again: it is not possible, nor does it appear that there be a link to somewhere where you can do a search, although I may be mistaken there. This is rather strange, as the English-language database site of the European Patent Office is run from the Patent Office at http://dips.patent.gov.uk

This is one of the"esp@cenet" sites, all of which are of identical layout and appearance, with minor modifications. The primary database here is the UK one, of course, but access is also offered to the European, Japanese, worldwide and other databases. Input can be by a choice of eight fields, any one of which or a combination of them can be used for the search parameters. Boolean algebra can be used in, for example, the Title field. The results are given in the form of a Web page list of all patents meeting your search criteria. There is a hyperlink from each number to a page giving the bibliographic data of the patent in question. PDF files for the full versions and figures may be downloaded, although this feature seemed to have a bug the first time I looked at it. In fact, this is a bit of a pain, because, if you put in "printed circuit" in the title field, you may get 100 or more patent numbers as a result (depending on the time scale and the database searched). There may be, say, ten which have a title relating to the data you are seeking. To download separately the specification, the claims and the figures of these ten would take quite some time and mouse activity.

The European esp@cenet site is at http://ep.dips.org

It is virtually the same,except that it is triplicated in French and German, as well as English. Speaking of language, if you are using the title as a search keyword, then it is language-sensitive. You may therefore need to enter it as something like"printed circuit" or "circuit imprimé" or "leiterplatte" if searching European patents.

The European Patent Office has a useful site at the impossibly-long but unequivocal URL of http://www.european-patent-office.org

This site is useful, in three languages, also giving much information. Quite frankly, I did not pursue this very much because the connection was very slow both times I tried to access it (their server may well be overloaded with requests). The home page is of terrible design, a drab combination of several frames, mostly loaded with graphics, taking a minute or more to download. It has a number of "hot spots" in a graphics menu system and clicking on any of them caused the central frame to be replaced by an equally drab-looking menu leading to the information, of which there is a plethora. All the pages seem to be heavily graphics-intensive.

Probably for the same reasons, the USA's equivalent is equally slow ­ in fact, impossibly so at peak times. Trying it in the early morning (0700 GMT) was much better. The home page is not excessively graphics-oriented and the daughter-pages are even better. This site of the US Patents and Trademark Office at http://www.uspto.gov is one of the few that offers a built-in database search facility, limited to US patents. This is easy-to-use and rapid but it does not seem possible to download the figures which form an important part of the patent specifications. The text, however, is in full and directly viewable as Web pages.

The French office can be found (if you are lucky) at http://www.inpi.fr

It is not just painfully slow, it is mortally so. Just accessing the site causes it to time out as often as not. If you should manage to establish a connection, downloading the heavily and unnecessarily graphics-intensive Home Page is lo-o-o-ong: on the one occasion I was able to do so, it took over four minutes. It claims to have an inbuilt database search facility for patents published since 1 July 1996 but I never managed to even reach the page where I enter the keyword or words ­it bombed out on me each time. There is a wealth of information available but,be warned, only in French, of course.

To wind this review up, I should like to mention two US patent search facilities. The first is stupendous and is run by IBM as a public service. This is where I advise anyone to go to do a search. The site is slow at peak hours, but not impossibly so and certainly not as bad as some others. The search page can be found at http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/boolquery.html

As can be seen in Figure 1: it offers three Boolean fields, the category of which can be individually chosen from some 20 types. The search can be chosen from US, European or World databases over a chosen time scale. The results, and this is exceptional, are offered directly on the Net, including at least the key figures as well as the full text. Keen followers of this column may have noticed in the screen captures in past issues that one of the shortcuts on my browser is entitled Patent Server and this shows the importance I place on this site. Incidentally, on the same site, there is a gallery of obscure patents, including such things as "Devices for Making Artificial Egg Yolk in the Form of Disks" or a "Hat Simulating a Fried Egg". Even better, there is a link to the Wacky Patent of the Month: at the time of writing, it is a "Combined Clothes-Brush, Flask, and Drinking-Cup". One of the prior ones is a "Pat on the Back Apparatus". Nice to know that patents can be humorous!

The final site to be mentioned is a purely commercial one. It allows some basic information to be searched for nothing, but as you wish more detail, so you start to pay. Depending on the service you use, a search can cost up to a few tens of dollars for a full day's usage, which is not exorbitant compared to an attorney's search. The site itself at http://www.patentminer.comis neat and efficient. The costing of the paid services is made very clear, so there can be no equivocation about what to expect. However, it is limited to US patents, apparently. Of course, being of Scottish origin, I did not subscribe to any of the services, knowing that the editor of this journal would not refund me the cost (sorry, Ed! Only joking!), so I cannot judge beyond the free search,which was efficient as far as obtaining the list of patents issued in 1996 for the subject I was looking for was concerned. The text can be viewed in HTML or downloaded in PDF format. The figures can be downloaded directly from the IBM database, if you are on a paying service. I am not really sure whether this site offers any real advantage over the last one, except that the response time may be shorter. Incidentally, the whole site is secure.

 Figure 1 IBM patent database search engine entry page

Table ISubjective judgement of sites mentioned

The technical information in Table I is judged on the ease of obtaining some desired data, excluding patent searching, directly from the Web pages. The site quality is judged from the time required to download the appropriate pages, the ease of use, the readability and the ease of navigation between pages. The search quality is based on the range of data offered by patent database searching, combined with the ease of use of the search engine.

Brian EllisMosfilotiCyprusb_ellis@protonique.com