The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has entered into a no-cost, two-year agreement with Google to make bulk electronic patent and trademark public data available to the public in bulk form. Under the deal, the USPTO will provide Google with existing bulk, electronic files, which Google will host, without modification, for the public free of charge. This bulk data can be accessed at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto.html.
The USPTO does not currently have the technical capability to provide this public information in a bulk machine readable format that is desired by the intellectual property (IP) community. This arrangement is to serve as a bridge as the USPTO develops an acquisition strategy which will allow the USPTO to enter into a contract with a contractor to retrieve and distribute USPTO patent and trademark bulk public data. The contractor will be capable of acquiring this bulk data and providing it to the public.
Until now, USPTO's public data in bulk form has been provided solely as a fee-based service. The USPTO estimates that nearly ten terabytes of information will be made available. Both parties will work together to make additional data available in the future, including patent and trademark file histories and related data.
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