Submission + - Public data: open or owned?
kpw10 writes: The online access to US patent data has seen significant changes recently with the release of Google's patent search as well as the beta launch of the All Patents Initiative's search interface. For the first time these tools allow the public to search US patents issued since 1790. Current search tools offered by the USPTO only allow searching for patents issued after 1976, leaving some four million patents as digital orphans. In addition to allowing search access the All Patents Initiative, operated by a consortium of business and academic interests, intends to address the needs of bulk users of patent data. Currently those wishing to access data about the patent collection in its entirety for analytical purposes, such as examining trends in innovation, must purchase data either from the USPTO or other commercial providers — an unfortunate and surprisingly common problem with public datasets. In many respects these two search interfaces mirror the ideological differences already being fought between Google's book scanning project and the Internet Archive's Open Library. Each provides a new form of access to a vast but digitally inaccessible public domain dataset — one by effectively making it property of a corporation and the other by distributing digital ownership to the public. The question this begs: how best can we maintain open access to public data while expanding its value through digitization efforts like these?
