PAIR Offline

The USPTO's PAIR site has been offline since Friday. The reason that this is a major problem is that the PTO has refused to allow anyone else (such as Lexis, Derwent, or Google) to build a parallel database of PAIR data.

Comments

[out of the box]

Wouldn't it be a huge cost savings for the PTO if they went to Google Docs to publish (as non-editable .pdfs) all Office Actions and submissions in published applications? They could probably arrange a one-time payment to upload all their electronic archives to some "cloud", and bind Google to maintain 24-7 access in consideration for being the exclusive access point to PTO back files. ...

Just blue-skying this one, obviously.

[MM]

A lot of stuff was down on and off over the weekend... I couldn't log in to telework at all. I think it was due to the tropical storm; they might have shut some things down as a precaution.

[anonymousAgent]

Wow - Peterlin is gone for ONLY ONE MONTH and ALREADY things are falling apart. They need to recruit Peterlin to return, and set things straight.

[Matt]

That's a reason. I suppose other reasons are that hardware sometimes fails, etc. One of my orders with Amazon had an issue over the weekend too.

I'm not entirely sure storing PAIR data on anything but a PTO machine is entirely wise. Do any of Lexis, Thomson, or Google host secure, confidential documents, such as those relating to the construction of weapons? I suppose a sufficient contract with a parallel host could keep the information reasonably secure. And it would certainly help Google keep an eye on Microsoft.

[Fiber Pneuman]

I would imagine the parallel database would NOT include pre-publication information.

[Sean]

This is second-hand info, but I'm told that if you can log in to Private PAIR, you can then access Public PAIR records. Essentially it's a back door.

But the problem you identify remains.

[kk]

Public PAIR appears to be back up.

[Y Peter Fujii]

US Patent Full-Text and Image Database (patft1.uspto.gov/) is also turning on and off at this moment. This disappointed me. I see USPTO as a nice public facility serving everybody. It is symbol of our civilization.

[left coast]

Since PAIR is frequently down or turning on and off, the above-mentioned civilization is not very advanced.

[millard duckworth iii]

Google patents is riddled with ocr errors and sometimes figures are missing lines and end up looking like connect-the-dots pictures, so i wouldn't hand over the keys to them just yet

As for derwent, I would give them the job because i love it when they change numbers from the standard format by dropping zeros or ones or adding the same to fit with some preconceived and mildly retarded data type. It just makes my day

[TwiceAsBad]

What's even worse when the PTO don't allow a duplicate data base by outside providers is that many players are trying to find ways to scrape the site to with robots to replicate the data which appears to create more problems than it is worth.

The PTO should go the route of the Library of Congress using Flickr and start to let in outside firms to open up the data pipe and kick start the semantic web's efforts.