Australian patents now on the web, in full

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 12 July 2007 10:57

Your IT - Home IT

For the first time, the full text of Australian patents can be searched, viewed and printed at no cost, by anyone, thanks to Cambia, a non-profit international organisation based in Canberra.

Cambia (www.cambia.org ) has extended its worldwide patent resource 'the Patent Lens' (www.patentlens.net ) to include Australian patents. It claims to have added full text of over 115,000 Australian granted patents and over 580,000 patent applications have been added to the Patent Lens collection of almost seven million worldwide patent documents.

To achieve this, the Patent Lens team claims to have completed optical character recognition (OCR) of almost ten million pages of Australian patent documents to turn the images into searchable text.

"Until now, the crucial information in Australian patents, such as what was invented and what is claimed, simply has not been searchable" said Cambia CEO Richard Jefferson. "If you don't know what's out there, you can't know whether you can deliver your own inventions and ideas. And you can't build on others' work. Worldwide innovation depends on clarity and transparency of patent rights."

Cambia's view is supported by the journal Nature Biotechnology. Cambia quotes a recent editorial focusing on its patent work saying: "It is estimated that under-exploitation of technical information... costs European industry alone $20 billion each year—simply because the inability to access relevant patent information results in duplication of effort or the creation of products that overlap with prior art...Cambia's Patent Lens is a giant leap in the right direction."

Australian patents are also linked to their counterparts internationally, and, says Cambia, the status of the patent family can now be easily determined.