Remember that Dennis Crouch initially focused attention on the Patent and Trademark Office’s use of a ‘robots.txt’ file to restrict search engines from crawling and indexing decisions of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. I explained the technical cause and effect of the robots file in this post, and even offered a proposed solution. While researching that post, I discovered a bit of technical history that made me wonder if someone at USPTO made a conscious policy decision to restrict search engine access in order to force users to use its own flawed search function:

“As an aside, the presence of this robots.txt file on the BPAI server is particularly troublesome when you consider a bit of history. As recently as a few years ago, PTO apparently did not use such bot-blocking tactics – users were able to search BPAI decisions using Google by limiting your search to the old decisions directory. Now, this hack provides an extremely limited results set – today, an unlimited search on that directory returns only 137 results. It appears, therefore, that a decision was made to actively remove Board decisions from the internet search space in favor of the flawed USPTO search page.”

The USPTO search page for BPAI decisions is so flawed in this modern age of quick and effective browser-based search technologies that no one can seriously argue that it provides an acceptable degree of transparency. Indeed, the technical switch made a couple years ago seems to have placed Board decisions behind an opaque shield.

Now we have an interesting twist: President Obama, acting swiftly on his stated commitment to transparency in government, adopted a wide-open robots.txt file on the whitehouse.gov servers on his first day in office. The 2-line permissive Obama file replaced the 2400-line restrictive robots.txt file that was on the servers, thanks to the Bush administration, up to the day before.

The PTO cleary can’t keep its restrictive approach under the new administration. And, thanks to President Obama’s swift action, we now see that, indeed, it is something that can be changed overnight.

I know you don’t want to quit reading about substantive patent law while you’re away from the office for turkey day, so I figured I’d share some ‘interesting reads’ I’ve come across over the last couple weeks.

Enjoy!

1.  Dennis Crouch on the Patent Office’s blocking of search engines via robots.txt files

Dennis has really found something interesting here.  For those of you that don’t know, robots.txt files help webmasters control the ability of bots to access particular content areas on a particular web server.  The use of such files is standard practice in the web development arena and their mere presence is not worrisome.

You can read all about these files on robotstxt.org (the about page is particularly informative).

But, the robots.txt file uncovered by Dennis shows that the Office has instructed all bots to refrain from accessing all content on the server hosting decisions of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences.  Bots, of course, can ignore the directives of robots.txt files, but all reputable search engines no doubt follow them strictly, which means that none of the BPAI decisions are being indexed.

This begs the question:  Is the Office, through this search engine blocking practice, failing to meet it statutory duty of “disseminating to the public information with respect to patents and trademarks?”  (35 U.S.C. §2(a)(2))

2.  Peter Zura on Barack Obama’s Transition Team member Reed Hundt – No fan of the U.S. patent system

All patent stakeholders are wondering what changes the forthcoming Obama administration will bring to the patent system.  Peter connected a few interesting dots on the issue.  Turns out, Reed Hundt, a Lead on President-elect Obama’s “Economics and International Trade Agency Review Team,” thinks “America’s patent system is a mess.”  Oh, and he has more than a few radical ideas on how to fix it.  How radical?  Read Peter’s article.

3.  Gene Quinn on Unequal Treatment at the United States Patent and Trademark Office

Gene observes that, even in the wake of KSR v. Teleflex, a two-tiered system in the Office is granting patents on inventions that are “clearly obvious” while denying patent protection to more worthy inventions:

“The Patent Office is not only treating similarly situated individuals differently in violation of the law, but they are also spending needless time addressing stupid inventions while meaningful inventions languish. This is not only terrible, it is recklessly stupid given our current economic crisis.”