In the course of preparing this video, I drafted a new patent application which is now filed as a provisional and available to all users as a demo document from the dashboard.  I found it effectively helped me use terminology consistently annotate the figures, validate that formal requirements were met (e.g. claim terms, part references, and callouts supported, claim tree correctly formed, etc), and export it in the required format.

Here’s what a patent attorney said after watching it this morning:

“I would definitely tell them USPTO should adopt it and it would add value to attorney’s system.  Receiving appropriately structured material will make their job easier.  I’ve used [TeamPatent] in the past and been impressed by it.  I’d like to adopt it if the standard of care issue could be addressed; that is, if the Patent Office endorsed it.  I’d be happy to talk with the USPTO if they’d like.”  (contact us for a reference)

After signing in, goto the dashboard and you’ll see a new area which allows you to enter a document number or create a browser bookmark. The bookmark can be used wherever you search patent prior art (e.g. USPTO, FreePatentsOnline, and Google Patents)–when you’re on a page reading a patent, click the bookmark to import the specification and drawings into TeamPatent.

A user’s patent application US20070022295 “System and method for providing secure message signature status and trust status indication” is imported as a demonstration document in all users’ dashboards as TP Sample Patent – Secure Message.  TeamPatent automatically highlighted the following errors in red, allowing a user to quickly navigate to them and make changes.

1. sender 30, mail sender 30, message sender 30, and LAN 30 (should be LAN 18?)
2. mobile device 38, receiver 38
3. component 42, digital signature 42, Cert 42, CRLs 42
4. device 100, message text 100
5. callout 62 (Retrieve sender’s public key) in Fig. 3 is unsupported

Photonics Magazine asked us to parse their user community’s seminal patent, US4704583, “Light amplifiers employing collisions to produce a population inversion”.  It’s available as in your dashboard as TP Sample Patent – Optical Amplifier.  TeamPatent automatically found the following errors:

1. callout 45 (RF Power) in Fig. 3 is not supported in the specification
2. elongated cavity 121 is not supported in the figures
3. heating coil 126 is not supported in the figures
4. electrode 127 is also, erroneously, called temperature regulator 127
5. callout 138 in Fig. 4 is not supported in the specification
6. callout 436 in Fig. 5 is not supported in the specification

We think TeamPatent will become part of the standard of care attorneys and agents will practice before filing patent applications.  TeamPatent will obviate tedious hours currently spent manually checking references and avoid errors (such as the above) that make it through manual checks. We also think that an automatic import facility will make TeamPatent more approachable for professionals because what’s more compelling than seeing one of your own published patents run through the validation engine?

One of our users is a former patent examiner who’s pressed us to provide better tools for the PTO.  Since applications are typically published before the first office action, the import functionality will allow examiners to automatically identify likely errors.  This will provide the facility to both measure and improve the Patent Quality Index (PQI) metrics USPTO Director-Elect, David Kappos has proposed.

We welcome your comments on how good a fit TeamPatent will be in these applications.

Notable features:

• Free: (FreePatentsOnline only?). No explicit discussion of how free info is affecting business models of “high value”-added vendors.
• Human-generated abstracts using consistent terms (Thomson only)
• Patent Families (i.e. equivalent applications filed in various countries are grouped): provided by most paid services
• Assignee normalization (i.e. recognizing that “IBM”=”Int’l Business Machines”, etc): provided by some paid services. Some track company acquisitions/divestitures as well.
• Classification normalization (i.e. tracking initial classification vs. subsequent reclassification, possibly linking different country’s classification systems): provided by some providers.
• Language translation: automatic or human-assisted services.

There were also presentations on:

• US legislation S515 is likely to pass this year which moves from “first to invent” to “first to file”, allows pre-issuance third party submissions, and other changes.
• International trends. For example, Chinese filings are expected to exceed US filings in 2012.

Franklin Pearce Law School described how they teach the practice of searching, preparing, and litigating patent (applications) while most law schools teach “black book” (i.e. teaching the laws but not the practice). We look forward to incorporating our software into their clinics.

• Users can’t remember many “strong” passwords so making them remember another one is burdensome.
• Users typically reuse their passwords and we don’t want any possibility compromising your accounts on other services.
• With OpenID, we can partner with other services such that users can navigate transparently from, say, Lexis or Thomson’s sites, to TeamPatent.

Clickpass harvests users’ address books
Clickpass has the most pleasant implementation of OpenID, so we gave it a trial review. After integrating with their service, we realized that when users authenticate on, say, Google or Yahoo, Clickpass requires users to give them their full contacts/address book (this is the list of names and emails for every user they’ve ever communicated with). If a user denies this request, they can’t log in with their Google or Yahoo account.

Google
www.clickpass.com is requesting access to your Google Account for…Google Contacts
Yahoo
http://www.clickpass.com is asking to read your data in Yahoo! Address Book.

We researched Clickpass before this deployment and this intrusive requirement was not mentioned either by Clickpass or others in the blogosphere. There is no reason for a user to want Clickpass to have this information as it doesn’t help Clickpass accomplish any task on their behalf. Clickpass isn’t a social web type of site so it’s unclear how Clickpass could use this information directly. I speculate that harvesting users’ social web info and repackaging it for advertisers may be the primary reason for Clickpass’ valuation by investors.

Many sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, etc ask for permission to access your contacts list (e.g. from Outlook or your email provider). But this has always been an optional convenience (which I’ve declined). With the increasing prevalence of these sorts of social web services, users may become less concerned about divulging this information. However, we don’t feel this time has yet arrived (if it ever will) to require this openness, especially for more conservative, business users.

The other issue we had with Clickpass was that the OpenID’s it provides are in their own domain. For example, if user A comes to our site B and we direct them to Clickpass, user A would typically authenticate on a service they’re already using such as Google. However, Clickpass tells us they’re authenticated on Clickpass. This makes it very difficult for site B to ever stop using Clickpass (i.e. vendor lock-in). It would be necessary to ask each and every user to authenticate on Clickpass, supply another OpenID provider, and then turn off the Clickpass authentication. We thought at first that there was some technical reason for this indirection but it appears to be driven by other motives.

Switched to JanRain’s RPX
JanRain provides a competing service, RPX which is also free (at the basic level) and passes through to site B the ultimate OpenID provider Google. Michael Olson of JanRain explains,

No, we do not engage in vendor lock-in of any sort. So if you decide to scrap RPX and connect via OpenID directly to an identity provider, you can easily take over the system on your end without any obfuscation of data on our part.

JanRain’s RPX is free for the basic level…when users authenticate with Google, they’ll see, “Please confirm that you want to use your Google account to sign in to SiteB.JanRain.com”. If you want a “custom trust root” so users will instead see, “Please confirm that you want to use your Google account to sign in to SiteB.com”, you’ll have to upgrade. Ditto for an SLA and phone tech support. The upgrade is $0.10/user, progressively declining to $0.025/user at 1m users.

Looks like we have a contender. They also support an OpenID-type login for sites such as Facebook which aren’t OpenID-compliant. In addition, they pull user’s profile information from SREG, OAuth, and proprietary interfaces and provide it in a normalized format. We’ll see how this works out…

In a subsequent post, “Toupin and the PTO have since rejected that number as a large overstatement and have indicated that they will provide better numbers shortly. The bottom line is still true – the PTO is experiencing a cash-shortfall and is cutting its own budget wherever it can.”

In a most recent post, PatentlyO received clarification from the USPTO:

both the original and continuation filings are down to around FY 04 levels. As compared to FY 08, original filings are on track to drop about 10% while continuations will likely be down over 20%. The large drop in continuation filing is likely an artifact due to the large number of continuations filed at the beginning of FY 08 in anticipation of the looming limits on continuation practice.